Destination Innsbruck and Tirol

Tourism is vitally important to Tirol and Innsbruck. The Tirol tourism industry directly and indirectly employs 60,000 people and generates around EUR 8.4 billion in turnover. Across the winter of 2016/17 and the summer of 2017, the region recorded a total of 47.7 million overnight stays, in contrast to just 28.3 million in 1971. It is now Austria’s most visited province. For its part, Innsbruck attracted a record 3.2 million overnight stays in 2017, making it the second most popular city for visitors behind Vienna. It projects itself as a sophisticated Alpine city offering excellent employment and leisure opportunities.

Innsbruck’s long association with the Olympic Winter Games – an event it staged twice in the space of 12 years – has played its part in this development. The staging of the first of those Games in 1964 helped trigger the growth of the local tourism industry. Investment in infrastructure, venues and facilities, most of it made with the 1964 Games in mind, combined with the increased global exposure that hosting the Olympic Winter Games provided, helped the city attract growing numbers of visitors. The local authorities made sustained efforts in the years afterwards to promote both Innsbruck and Tirol and showcase their Olympic credentials.

Those efforts were initially focused on the extensive use of the words “Olympia” and “Olympische” to denote the area, its facilities and the venues built to stage the two Olympic Winter Games. Names such as Olympiabahn – denoting the local rail network – and Olympiaregion Seefeld, where the Nordic skiing events were held, created a strong and long-lasting link between the host city and the Games. That association is more understated today, with the letter “O” having largely replaced both words – Innsbruck’s Olympic Village district is now known by its residents as the “O-Dorf”, while the bus service connecting it to the city centre is referred to as the “O-Line”. Olympiaregion Seefeld has retained its Olympic name, however, and the Olympiaworld brand covers most of Innsbruck’s Olympic venues.

The improvements made to Innsbruck’s road network in preparation for the 1964 Olympic Winter Games also boosted tourism. By increasing accessibility and mobility, they helped to bring larger numbers of visitors to the city and region, many of them enticed by what they had seen when watching the Games. This helped Austria’s tourism income for the first nine months of 1964 to increase by more than 18 per cent on the same period in the previous year, while total tourist income was higher than for any previous year in full. Carefully planned with the future and not just the Games in mind, improvements to the local road infrastructure included the construction of the first section of the Brenner Highway, a vital link with Germany to the north and Italy to the south.  

Innsbruck and Tirol’s Olympic venues have played their part in generating economic benefits, creating jobs and boosting visitor numbers, as have entities such as Innsbruck Tirol Sport (ITS). A not-for-profit company set up after the 2012 Winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG) to build on the event’s legacy and develop the expertise that it helped create, ITS focused its energies on attracting events to the city. By 2020, it had helped set up 60 major and smaller events, watched by over 850,000 spectators in all. In the process, ITS generated over EUR 80 million in additional economic value.

A significant percentage of visitors to Innsbruck come for business, trade shows and conferences. Interalpin, the world’s leading trade fair for Alpine technologies, is held at Congress Messe Innsbruck, which staged ice hockey matches at the 1964 Olympic Winter Games. Rebuilt in 2011, it hosts major medical conferences and also stages concerts and art exhibitions as part of Innsbruck’s thriving cultural scene. 

The many venues on the Olympiaworld complex – two of them Olympic – host a wide range of events, including circus and ice shows, musicals, and concerts by leading performers such as Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Steve Aoki and Pink.

The city continues to develop its image – not just trading on its Olympic status but building on it and looking for new ways in which to promote itself. Following an extensive consultancy process in 2009, for example, it set out seven aspects of the future city it wanted to become: fascinating Alpine mountains; specific sporting expertise; a vibrant urban space; avant-garde Alpine aesthetics; young, intelligent and cosmopolitan inhabitants; healthy living; and ecological excellence.  

Nevertheless, Innsbruck has not lost sight of its Olympic past, as celebrations and events have shown. The inauguralWinter Youth Olympic Games, held in Innsbruck and nearby Seefeld in 2012, were warmly embraced and supported by the city’s residents and helped put the Olympic Games back at the heart of Innsbruck’s appeal to visitors. The subsequent celebrations held to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Olympic Winter Games in 2014 and the fifth anniversary of the Winter YOG in 2017 underlined how important the Games remain to the city and to Tirol.