Emmanuel Thomas with reports from DPA
BERLIN – Germany’s Alpine region south of Munich, normally a popular choice among many tourists for skiing, hiking and tours of local beer breweries, has been noting a lower number of visitors since the pandemic.
Fewer tourists arrived in the German Alps at the turn of the year than were doing so around this time before the pandemic, and despite coronavirus-related restrictions being long since lifted across Europe, the region’s tourist numbers are still lagging behind previous seasons.
As such, visitors in the lake resort town of Tegernsee and the ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the foot of Germany’s tallest mountain have also been less likely to be met with crowds of tourists.
Some 878,000 overnight guests arrived in the months of December 2022 and January 2023, meaning a drop of almost 13% compared to the same period in 2019/2020, the Federal Statistical Office reported at the start of April.
Measured against the turn of the year 2021/2022, however, it was 36% more, despite the initial scarcity of snow in the most recent winter season.
Just under half of the increase (44%) was recorded in the mountainous southern-German Allgäu region, known for its ornate Neuschwanstein Castle said to have inspired the Disney logo.
Tourists currently stayed an average of 3.5 days in the Alpine regions and thus one day longer than tourists in Germany as a whole, marking a total of 3.1 million overnight stays – 11% less than in the two winter months just before the outbreak of the pandemic.
