Business Destination, China Year and Health Tourism
COLOGNE – From 7th until 11th March, the Cologne Tourist Board once again took part in ITB, the world’s leading travel trade show, which was held in Berlin. In cooperation with Cologne’s neighbouring cities along the Rhine, Bonn and Düsseldorf, the Cologne Tourist Board presented its services to international trade visitors and members of the public at Stand 103 in Hall 8.2.
At the Medientalk held by the Rhineland cities of Cologne, Bonn and Düsseldorf on 9th March 2012, Cologne Mayor Jürgen Roters talked with Düsseldorf Mayor Dirk Elbers and District Administrator Fritjof Kühn (Rhine-Sieg District / Bonn) about the topic “Strong Business Locations — Important Business Travel Destinations”. “Cologne is an outstanding business location that’s not only easy to reach, but also a great place to meet,” said Mayor Roters. “Boasting the world’s fifth-largest exhibition centre, Koelnmesse is a major attraction for guests from all over the world. In addition, the city offers ideal conditions for conferences and congresses, thanks to its more than 150 event venues and 43,000 events. The slogan in 2012 is therefore ‘Business Destination Cologne’. As the key communications tool for this campaign, the Cologne BizzBox and its six magazines refreshingly illustrates the various aspects of Cologne as a business location. The cooperation with our partner cities along the Rhine River also has high priority for us. Our joint museum ticket is a great example of our successful collaboration.”
The head of Cologne’s municipal business office, Ute Berg, underscored the importance of visitors and business travellers to the city. “We want our branding process to make Cologne even more widely known among investors, scientists, and tourists in Germany and abroad so that we can get more of them to come to our city,” she said.
Tourism to Cologne continued to increase steadily in 2011. Last year a total of 2.84 million hotel guests came to the city and spent altogether 4.97 million overnight stays in Cologne. Compared to the previous year, this represents an increase of 9.7 per cent in terms of guest arrivals and 8.6 per cent in terms of overnight stays – the best result in the history of the city’s tourism. By comparison, Germany measured a 4 per cent overall national increase in overnight stays, and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia had an increase of 5 per cent. International guests accounted for 874,443 visits and a marked rise of 11 per cent; they continue to represent an overall share of 34 per cent of the visitors to the city. The trend of vacationing in one’s home country remains strong: with 1.97 million visitors (a rise of 9.1 per cent), Germany is still the most important source of visitors to Cologne.
For 2012 the Cologne Tourist Board has chosen the motto “Business Destination Cologne” for its marketing activities. Inspired by the German National Tourist Board’s motto for this year, “Business Travel Destination Germany”, the Cologne Tourist Board, taking its lead from the Cologne Convention Bureau, aims to highlight the city’s activities in the business sector. These activities will be underlined by the Cologne BizzBox, a portfolio containing six magazines that highlight various facets of the city as a business destination. The BizzBox will be introduced at the ITB for the first time. Extensive special pages will also be showcased on the website www.conventioncologne.de. In addition, shared activities are being planned with the German Convention Bureau, including a joint event for the Austrian meeting industry.
The Cologne Convention Bureau (CCB) will continue to focus on marketing the city as a congress and trade fair destination at key international fairs and via hosted buyer events and fam trips. Especially promising potential for future development can be found in the numerous academic institutes, universities and research institutions of Cologne, which use events as a basic instrument for sharing and exchanging knowledge. Together with KölnKongress, CCB aims to attract more academic conferences to the city. One of these is the World Congress of Pathology, which was acquired last year and will come to Cologne for the first time in 2016. In order to compete internationally, CCB cooperates closely with the DÜSSELDORF convention bureau. Both cities along the Rhine placed successfully in the 2011 state-wide competition Erlebnis.NRW. Their project “Meetropolis KÖLNDÜSSELDORF,” which gained support as a result of the competition, will kick off in time for IMEX 2012, Germany’s most important trade fair for meetings and incentive trips, with a new marketing campaign that will focus especially on international markets.
“China is an enormously promising market for Cologne; the number of visitors from that country rose by 27.5 percent last year. The city of Cologne has declared 2012 to be ‘China Year’, thus creating another excellent opportunity to build on this positive trend and intensify contacts with China”, declares Ute Berg, head of Cologne’s municipal business office. The Cologne Tourist Board is highlighting the 2012 China Year in all of its marketing activities and has also supported the city of Cologne in developing the promotional website www.chinajahr-koeln.de. A special highlight will be the “NRW-China Celebrations” from 14th to 16th September 2012, which are being organized by the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia and the city of Cologne.
2012 promises to be another strong year for trade fairs in Cologne. After a successful International Furniture Fair (imm) in January, Germany’s most important art fair, ART COLOGNE, will take place from 18th to 22nd April. This summer, Europe’s biggest trade fair for computer and video games, gamescom, will run from 15th until 19th August. A particular highlight of the year will be photokina, the world’s leading imaging fair, which will run from 18th until 23rd September. Cologne’s calendar of events promises lots of exciting cultural events in addition to regular favourites such as the “Kölner Lichter” fireworks display, the ColognePride parade and the Cologne Christmas markets. The Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum will feature the exhibition “Rama and Sita – India’s Most Beautiful Love Story” from 21st April to 21st October 2012. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum will present an exhibition titled “1912 – Mission Modernity” from 31st August until 30th December 2012, which promises to be a spectacular retrospective of the 1912 exhibition of the Sonderbund school of artists in Cologne. What’s more, the classic musical CATS will be performed in a specially constructed theatre tent from 22nd September until 28th October 2012. Cologne also has a lot of exciting sporting events on offer this year. On 12th May the DFB Cup Women’s final will take place in the Rheinenergie Stadium. And the VELUX EHF FINAL 4 will host the four best handball teams of Europe from 26th until 27th May in the Lanxess Arena.
New flight connections to the Cologne/Bonn airport will further improve the city’s accessibility. The Cologne Tourist Board will support the Cologne/Bonn airport in its efforts to acquire new connections, for instance at the ROUTES conference CIS in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in July 2012. New connections include Ural Airlines flights between Moscow and Cologne/Bonn three times a week starting in April, and a new connection from London-Heathrow with Germanwings.
The Cologne Tourist Board’s successful cooperation with the German railway company Deutsche Bahn will continue to expand in 2012. The partnership got off to a promising start with a multiple-page Cologne special in the customer magazine “DB mobil”, featuring a competition entered by over 20,000 travellers. In addition, the Cologne Tourist Board supports the project “Bicycle Region Rhineland”, which it helped to establish. The website www.radregionrheinland.de features extensive information about bikes, services related to bicycling, plus a wide selection of suggested bike routes.
Health tourism is also becoming increasingly important for Cologne. That’s why the popular brochure “Health Cologne” will once again be published in Russian, Arabic and English this year and distributed at all leading trade fairs and road shows in the relevant source markets.
In addition to the travel packages for families and groups, the Cologne Tourist Board will once again offer the popular Media Travel Package in 2012, featuring visits to the live TV recordings of the show “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” (“Pop Idol”). Another feature that will be continued is the VideoBus Tour, which combines sightseeing with historical images, films and audio documents. The well-established Cologne WelcomeCard was reissued in 2011 and will for the first time offer visitors more than 100 discounts throughout the city. The card will now also be available at vending machines on train platforms and at the sales points of the public transportation system KVB. To offer visitors a better overview of guided city tours, the Cologne Tourist Board has published new flyers featuring an annual list of the most popular group tours and a biannual list of public tours. What’s more, the cities of Cologne, Bonn and Düsseldorf have teamed up for new joint museum passes that will give visitors access to major art museums such as the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn and the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, or alternatively to all three municipal museums. Buying a museum pass will allow visitors free entrance to all three art museums or all three municipal museums within a period of four weeks.
The online shop “der-koelnshop.de” was relaunched at the end of 2011 and now boasts a brand-new design, expanded features and an even wider selection of products. In order to make our website www.cologne-tourism.com even more user-friendly, it will be relaunched with new and improved graphics, content and technical functions. Within the area of mobile internet activities, the “Köln-Guide” app will soon be released in a bilingual version. And since 2010 the Cologne Tourist Information Office has been active on Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Further targeted social media campaigns are in the pipeline for 2012.
The three cities once again organized the 11th “RheinNacht” on 8th March 2012 at the Wasserwerk in the Charlottenburg/Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. At this traditional get-together, tour operators, travel journalists and other partners from the tourism sector had the opportunity to make new contacts and forge business links in a casual setting.
