Daily 12 March/März - ITB Berlin

ITB BERLIN ENGLISH DAILY 2010
Friday 12 March
from
The Travel Business Partnership
BRIEFLY
The large-scale art and cultural event, Holland Art Cities, is continuing throughout
2010 with Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht joining forces to present
a series of exceptional exhibitions and accompanying events. Among the highlights
this year is an exhibition of works from the Hermitage ‘Matisse to Malevich’
(Amsterdam), a retrospective of van Dongen (Rotterdam), exhibitions featuring the
work of the young Vermeer and of Kandinsky (The Hague), a retrospective on contemporary
design by Ron Arad at the reopened Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and
an exhibition of the work of furniture-maker and architect Gerrit Rietveld at the
Centraal Museum (Utrecht).
Visitor arrivals in Austria staying in classified accommodation declined by 1% to 32.3
million in 2009. Domestic travellers increased by 2.6% to 11 million, but international
arrivals declined by 2.7% to 21.3 million. Total overnights were down by
1.9% at 124.3 million, but overnights from international visitors decreased by 3.3%
to 89.8 million. As a result, average length of stay fell to 3.8 nights.
A new €200 million terminal building at Budapest’s Ferihegy Airport is on schedule
for completion in 2012, expanding passenger capacity at the airport to 15 million a
year. The terminal will give Ferihegy an additional 80 check-in counters, new selfservice
check-in facilities and boarding gates and improved passenger-screening
facilities, as well as doubling the current retail space.
The high-speed AVE rail link between Madrid and Valencia will start operations by
the end of 2010, cutting the journey time between the two cities from 3 hours 30
minutes to just 1 hour 35 minutes.
London’s Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park has enticed two three-Michelin-starred chefs
to open restaurants in the hotel this year – Frenchman Daniel Boulud will open Bar
Boulud in May and Heston Blumenthal will open his first London restaurant towards
the end of the year.
VisitScotland is claiming success for Scotland’s major promotion last year –
HomeComing 2009. Initial results show the year-long programme of events which
encouraged the Scottish Diaspora to ‘come home’ has exceeded its target of generating
€50 million of additional tourism income for Scotland. The full evaluation is
due out later this Spring, but VisitScotland says the interdependent interim analysis
of a quarter of the 112 funded events showed they had already generated €24
million – almost half the final target.
Istanbul is building up its conference sector, and this year will open Pendik Exhibition
Centre (with a capacity for 3,000 delegates) on the Asian side near Sabiha Gokcen