As of: February 23, 2024, 3:39 p.m
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City tour in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
© Jörg Carstensen/dpa/archive image
The number of tourists is increasing again.
The Senator for Economic Affairs firmly expects the trend to continue.
However, the city cannot yet repeat its old records.
Berlin - The number of tourists in Berlin continues to rise, but the high level from before the corona pandemic is still far from being reached.
However, Senator for Economic Affairs Franziska Giffey (SPD) is firmly expecting further growth this year.
“The goal is clearly to break the 30 million overnight stays mark in 2024 - and we will do that,” she said on Friday when presenting the tourism balance for the past year.
The managing director of the tourism company Visit Berlin, Burkhard Kieker, is similarly optimistic: “We expect at least a million more visitors here in the city.”
Among other things, Kieker hopes for events such as the European Football Championship.
Five games and the final will be played in Berlin in the summer.
There is also the 50th Berlin Marathon this year, and the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is coming up in November.
All of this should be a reason for many people to visit Berlin.
Last year, 12.1 million guests (plus 16 percent) came to the capital and accounted for 29.6 million overnight stays (plus 12 percent), according to the balance sheet from the Berlin-Brandenburg Statistics Office, which Giffey and Kieker presented.
In 2022 there were 10.4 million guests and 26.5 million overnight stays.
However, the number of overnight stays in the record year 2019 before the start of the pandemic was significantly higher at 34.1 million.
After all, the proportion of international overnight stays rose to over 40 percent last year for the first time since 2019.
Guests from overseas and from other European countries were initially hesitant to return after the pandemic.
The majority of Berlin guests (59.7 percent) still come from Germany - a total of 17,668,000. When it comes to visitors from abroad, Great Britain is in first place with 1.3 million overnight stays, followed by the USA with 1, 2 million, the Netherlands with 843,000 and Spain with 642,500 overnight stays.
The good development in tourist numbers from Great Britain, with an increase of a good 35 percent, is particularly due to the fact that there has been a significant improvement in flight connections, said Kieker.
Here, in particular, he and Giffey still see a significant need for action.
Further growth is hardly possible without additional flight connections.
From the point of view of the Senator for Economic Affairs, this is a “top priority area” for tourism in Berlin.
Berlin and the eastern federal states are still at a disadvantage in terms of air traffic compared to western Germany.
Visit Berlin and the capital's BER airport are in intensive discussions with the airlines, said Kieker.
It is necessary to work on further long-haul flights as well as to increase the medium-haul offering again.
Some other cities such as Barcelona and Amsterdam emerged from the Corona crisis faster than Berlin in terms of tourism due to better flight offerings.
dpa