On Stage: An Average of Five International Stories on Vienna Each Day
International requests for support with research into Vienna features approached pre-coronavirus pandemic levels in 2022: in the course of the year, the Vienna Tourist Board gave 520 international journalists from 39 countries assistance with their work. The Vienna Tourist Board’s worldwide media activities generated around 735 million contacts – on average, five Vienna stories were published somewhere in the world each day. To facilitate this, the experts at the Vienna Tourist Board were in constant contact with media representatives from above-the-line print and online publications, TV and radio, as well as blogs, social media, podcasts and vlogs. Vienna's reputation as one of the world's top travel destinations among renowned travel media is also down to the organization’s global media work: Travel + Leisure – one of the leading travel magazines in the US – ranked Vienna among its Best Places to Travel in April 2022. At the end of the year the publication listed the Austrian capital among its Best Places to Travel for 2023. The Spanish edition of Condé Nast Traveler named Vienna as the world's best international destination ("mejor destino internacional") in its 2022 Gold List. As part of its reasoning, it cited Vienna – out of all the classical European city destinations – as the capital of music ("la capital de la música") and one of the great “musts” in Europe. And at the end of 2022, Vienna was the only capital city worldwide to feature among Condé Nast Traveler’s 23 Best Places to Go in 2023.
Besides positioning Vienna as a destination for leisure travelers, the Vienna Tourist Board also uses targeted communication measures to successfully position Meeting Destination Vienna internationally – both by means of classic PR (i.e. earned media) and paid measures. One of the tools used by the Vienna Tourist Board to achieve this is the Vienna Press Info newsletter, which is tailored to individual markets. The launch of the Digital Press Ticket in spring 2022 represented yet another step towards greater sustainability and increased efficiency in the organization’s hospitality management activities – without compromising the individual service offering in place for journalists. A positive by-product of this new all-in-one solution is that physical welcome bags are no longer needed; ever since the introduction of the new ticket, the Vienna Tourist Board has been able to share digital information and bespoke programs for media representatives at the press of a button.
