What do foreign tourists who are interested in Germany actually do? They look for information and often end up on Germany.Travel, the website of the German National Tourist Board. There you can expect to find endearing anecdotes, for example about the country’s most famous castle, Neuschwanstein, which everyone wants to see.
Instead, website visitors are bombarded at every opportunity with wind turbine logos, climate protection lectures and emission-free tips – here politics seems to dictate tourism marketing, and potential holidaymakers are likely to feel duped.
The German National Tourist Board (DZT) is Germany’s tourism ambassador, responsible for a positive image. It is supposed to advertise abroad and show how beautiful the country is, so that travelers from all over the world come in droves and bring lots of foreign currency. And that’s exactly what they do: in 2023 alone, 81 million overnight stays by international guests were counted in Germany and 70.5 billion euros were spent here.
Whether this is with or without the involvement of the German National Tourist Board cannot be measured. In any case, the association is present everywhere, has 25 foreign offices, carries out 100 marketing campaigns a year and uses market analyses to find out what international tourists want to see in Germany. As a result, they are also extremely interested in sustainability in Germany.
How is that? Is it related to the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection? Every year, the ministry pays a good 34 million euros in funding to the DZT; in 2023 and 2024, there were even a good 40 million euros each, also for the “green transformation”.
Travelers should be made more aware of the issue of climate and environmental protection. “This will happen through greater consideration of the issue of climate protection in the advertising of Germany as a tourist destination by the German National Tourist Board,” says the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Low-emission travel will be highlighted.
In concrete terms, this looks like this: Holidaymakers should no longer cruise through the beautiful German countryside in a rented convertible. No, they should get to know Deutsche Bahn properly on the way. Such sustainable tips are garnished with a bright red wind turbine logo and the slogan: “Together we care”. It adorns photos of the Bastei Bridge in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains and the chalk cliffs on Rügen, for example – but it looks like a warning sign. But that’s not all: In India, the DZT is promoting the idea of going camping. Is that tempting?
For 2025, austerity is the order of the day. The ministry is considering cutting the budget to 32.4 million euros. According to GNTB spokeswoman Ann-Kathrin Harms, this would mean “a paradigm shift for the connectivity and competitiveness of incoming tourism.” Will a cut mean that in the future, attractions will be advertised without the wind turbine logo? Sometimes less is more.