Tourism 2025: Development Perspectives and Strategies for the Rural Area

The study analyses for the first time tourism-intensive and tourism-extensive regions in Austria considering spatial typologies such as rural, intermediate and urban areas. Further, scenarios for future tourism trends and strategies for the improvement of competitiveness have been developed. For the period until 2025, the baseline scenario shows a considerably differentiated development under the assumption that the visible trends and the regional growth differentials approximately continue: according to this growth pattern, it is to expect that the tourism-intensive rural, intermediate and urban regions in Western and Southern Austria will significantly lose market shares. In contrast to this unfavourable performance, the extensive rural, intermediate and urban regions will develop significantly more dynamics as these areas can use the demand shift towards post-modern structures much better. In order to improve the market performance, strategies increasing productivity, quality, innovation rates, product differentiation and the share of long-haul markets are suggested.