Austria's tourism is booming: record numbers despite challenges!

Austria's tourism has achieved a new record! With 81.59 million overnight stays in the 2024 summer season, the country exceeds its best result by 0.8 percent. Tourism State Secretary Susanne Kraus-Winkler is thrilled and explains that Austria is not only a popular holiday destination, but also offers high service quality and good price-performance ratio. The vast majority of the overnight stays come from international guests, despite a slight decline in Germany. Compared to 2019, the country still has an increase of 2.1 percent among Austrian visitors. These numbers underline the unbroken attractiveness of Austria for travelers from all over the world, as well as bmaw.gv.at reported.

The analysis also shows that foreign guests, despite challenging circumstances such as inflation and price sensitivity, flocked to Austria, which indicates the strong price-performance offer. The return of the US guests, the overnight stays of which rose by 15.3 percent compared to the previous year. While the Chinese number of visitors have not yet reached the level of 2019, the 421,000 overnight stays still show a positive development this summer.

Tourism policy was also committed to sustainability in 2023, as can be seen from Kraus-Winkler's interview. The government has implemented measures such as a national certification strategy and a new "sustainability bonus" for commercial tourism funding in order to make the industry future -proof. The tourism acceptance is to be better measured by annual surveys of over 10,000 people in order to take into account the needs of both visitors and residents. The challenges of "uneven tourism" are to be addressed by individual measures to ensure a balanced cooperation between tourists and locals, such as ots.at emphasized.