Tourism Season

2024 was a record year for tourism in Vienna. Is the city government encouraging overtourism via a relentless pursuit of ever-higher visitor numbers?

Photo by Elena Soroka on Unsplash

Servus!

Summer is here, and with it, a perennial topic in a European context: tourism and overtourism, something I last wrote to you about in March 2024 vis-à-vis a new exhibition at the Architekturzentrum Wien. The subject was brought back to my attention not merely by looking around, as it were, but by an excellent feature in the Viennese weekly newspaper Falter, provocatively called “Vienna Must Not Become Venice!” which looked at the different factors that have changed the face of Vienna’s first district in recent years—only one of which, it should be said, is tourism.

Overtourism as an experienced phenomenon is a mixture of fact and feeling, to be sure, though there’s no getting around the statistical evidence that 2024 was a record year for tourism in Vienna. Prior to the pandemic in 2019, 7.93 million people visited Vienna, a number which fell by around 75 percent to 2.01 million in 2020 when we all retreated into our homes and international travel routes were shut off. The post-pandemic recovery, driven by among other things ‘revenge tourism’ and the convergence of the dollar with the euro, has been dramatic, and last year, Vienna welcomed 8.17 million guests.

Vienna’s tourism trade is driven primarily by local traffic, which is to say, a combination of domestic and European tourism. In 2024, 1.77 million tourists came to Vienna from other parts of Austria, 2.29 million from neighboring states including 1.38 million Germans, and 2.33 from other European countries, including pronounced increases in the numbers of guests from the Baltic states, Poland, southeast Europe, and Turkey. After Austria and Germany, the next largest tourist contingent were Americans: close to 500,000 of them visited us in 2024 versus around 440,000 in 2019 pre-pandemic.

Overtourism is a difficult subject about which to write because of the tendency to lay the blame exclusively at the feet of the visitors themselves when it is, typically, a product of government policy, urban planning, social media trends, market behavior, and individual choice. Vienna is a great city—who can fault people for wanting to visit? Criticizing tourism itself, moreover, is something that will make hypocrites of us all in the end. Even residents of European cities nearabout destroyed by tourism—Venice, Dubrovnik, and to a lesser extent Barcelona and Amsterdam—will at some point leave those places to take their own vacations, during which they will rent Airbnbs and frequent souvenir shops and waffle stands of no benefit to the local population whatsoever.

Bemoaning tourism is like complaining that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. It’s something that’s been with us for hundreds of years, opened up the world to millions of people, and brings economic benefits of one kind or another—often low wage work, but that’s another matter—to the places tourists frequent. Tourism, then, is something that should be accepted, but also managed, and the matter at hand is whether Vienna’s city government is doing a good job on that front or if it is, in fact, encouraging or perpetuating overtourism and its effects—on our economy, our infrastructure, our environment—in a relentless pursuit of ever-higher visitor numbers.

The city’s attempts to regulate short-term lets have been welcome, though Falter reports they have not had that much of an impact as far on the number of apartments on the market; “according to Inside Airbnb, 13,790 Airbnbs are currently listed in Vienna, only around 900 less than in July 2024.” As part of a coming budget consolidation, the city plans to increase the local tax on hotel guests as well as fees imposed on parking coaches and mooring river boat cruise ships, though whether that will do anything to control visitor numbers is unclear. (It may simply increase revenues.) Regulating traffic in the first district and re-configuring the Ringstrasse to provide more space for pedestrians and cyclists should relieve some of the congestion in Vienna’s historic center that reaches its peak during the tourism season’s high points and makes it a place locals avoid.

Bis bald!

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