Up until the pandemic, city trips were so popular that it was already too much for the locals. Now it starts again. First experiences from Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Florence and Vienna.
Shopping, museums, the theater, a picnic in the park, a dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant and maybe a beer in the old town pub. Or just let yourself drift curiously in the streets of a strange city. There is hardly any other form of vacation that offers as many possibilities as a city trip, and this “multi-option”, as tourism researcher Julian Reif puts it, was also the reason for the steadily growing popularity of city trips. Until Corona came.
What will happen after the pandemic? Are cities still attractive as travel destinations? This is the question that Reif is investigating as the project manager of the German City Travel Monitor, a study in which the effects of the pandemic on city tourism in Germany are being examined at the German Institute for Tourism Research at the West Coast University of Applied Sciences. Representative people in Germany were surveyed about this in the summer of 2020, more data will be collected in the coming months. And even if the second lockdown and thus the renewed standstill in tourism was not yet in sight a year ago, Reif still considers the first results of the study to be meaningful. “City tourism will pick up again, but it will change,” he says.
Things are important to holidaymakers that only played a subordinate role before Corona: hygiene, distance rules, safety measures. City travelers will initially be less drawn to events with many people, concerts or Christmas markets, but more to the gardens and parks or excursions into the surrounding area. “The focus on digital visitor management will also remain in the long term,” says Reif. That became apparent even before the pandemic. Because with online tickets and traffic light systems, the rush of visitors can be kept within limits not only during a pandemic, but also afterwards when it comes to counteracting overtourism so that cities remain attractive not only for holidaymakers but also for residents. Eva Dignös
And how does the restart work in practice? Five examples from Germany and Europe: