It got brought up in the German news today that for 2018, there were 478-million over-night stays in hotels or B&B's.
The tourist business folks think it's time for a national German strategy on tourism (something that marginally exists today). Rather than advertise toward regions....like having a Baltic travel scheme, or a Black Forrest scheme, or having a Rhine Valley scheme....they'd prefer to help small or medium-sized hotels and tour companies to reach out.
Part of this is to ensure fast internet exists at these hotels and travel locations. Another element is to stress how environmentally-friendly that Germany is.
The parties are mostly divided. Some want higher pay situations to finally arrive for hotel employees. Some are noting that more non-German employees need to be procured (there's simply not enough Germans for the work).
From the perspective of the tourist himself? Almost nothing.
I travel around Germany a good bit, and one thing that is obvious over the past five years.....a lot of Chinese folks are now showing up. Just in a one-hour period in Heidelberg from last spring, I noted a minimum of five buses that showed up and dumped off sixty Chinese guests each. I took a Rhine River cruise last summer, and at one pick-up point, roughly a hundred Chinese folks boarded the vessel for part of the cruise. Even in Wiesbaden, I'll be sitting there at some bench and notice five or six Chinese tourists wandering by and admiring the landscape.
The other surprising group you see? Affluent Middle Eastern folks. A decade ago, that would have been rare.
The German states getting the 'bulk'? This is an interesting topic, which hurts some regions. The heavy-hitters are Berlin (the city), Bavaria, and Baden-Wuerttemberg. After that, it's Hamburg, Hessen, and the Pfalz. Then you start to take big steps downward, with Saxony-Anhalt, the Saarland, and Thuringia at the rock bottom.
If you use statistical data from four years ago, then two-hundred-million of these over-night stays were in 'spa-towns'....meaning cities with health resorts.
The question here at the end....could some national strategy come to exist, and if it did exist....would it even be helpful?
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