Vienna wants to turn Eurovision 2026 into a tourist jackpot

Eurovision is coming to Vienna and the city is thinking big.Keystone

After Mozart and waltzes, it’s time for glitter and kitsch choruses. Vienna is hosting Eurovision 2026, which starts this Tuesday, with a very serious ambition behind the celebration: transforming the competition into a gigantic tourist and cultural promotion operation.

Ouerdya AIT ABDELMALEK, Vienna / afp

A temple of classical music, Vienna is preparing to welcome fans of variety for the great Eurovision festival, which it hopes to take advantage of to further enhance its reputation as a cultural and musical destination. “All the cities that have hosted Eurovision in recent years show particularly positive developments in terms of economic growth and value creation,” noted the city’s deputy mayor Barbara Novak during a press conference, delighted with this showcase offered to the Austrian capital.

With 20 million overnight stays recorded and 8.9 million visitors in 2025, the city of two million inhabitants is already one of the most popular destinations in Europe, an attraction that goes well beyond its Christmas markets and its famous New Year’s classical concert. With Eurovision, there are a few tens of thousands of people additional people expected to hit the streets of the former imperial capital compared to May last year.

Cruises, yoga and glitter: Vienna goes into Eurovision mode.Keystone

And frequent its hotels, its restaurants, its shops, its museums, etc. “This generates significant activity in many neighborhoods,” underlines the municipality interviewed by AFP, even if, for the moment, it does not want to make any projections on the possible repercussions. “A detailed study (…) will be published after the event,†adds a spokesperson.

However, she specifies that attendance in Basel in 2025, where 500,000 people participated in Eurovision week, residents included, constitutes their benchmark. The city had spent 36 million euros to host the competition.

Vienna, with its finances in the red, paid out 22.6 million, or a third less, thanks to its “excellent existing infrastructure”, according to the municipality, starting with the 16,000-seat concert hall that it is making available to the competition.

Musical cruises

The city of Mozart and Beethoven, which hosts among others UN agencies and OPEC, has a long experience in organizing events and has already hosted Eurovision twice, the last of which in 2015. If the first official meeting of the telephone call is scheduled for Sunday, with “the turquoise carpet”, which will see candidates from the 35 participating countries parade between the Burgtheater and the majestic neo-Gothic town hall, Vienna has already gone into festive mode.

“From May 4 to 15, the whole city becomes a stage,” boasts the municipality’s communications department, which wants to offer an exemplary spectacle in a context of calls for a boycott against the participation of Israel and announcements of demonstrations which could somewhat spoil the celebration.

The 550 trams that circulate across the city have been displaying pennants proclaiming “Vienna 12 points” for two weeks, a nod to the counting of points awarded to the singers. In addition to the fans’ village in front of the city hall, which will be able to accommodate 15,000 people free of charge each day and 30,000 on the evenings of the semi-finals and the final, giant screens will be scattered in several other places to allow the public to attend the show in the open air.

The fans’ village, in front of Vienna’s town hall.Keystone

Musical cruises on the Danube, yoga sessions, a journey through the city’s queer history, workshops to prepare sausages or Wiener Schnitzel, the famous Austrian specialty of breaded veal schnitzel, feature in the “offstage” program.

With 170 million viewers around the world, not counting social networks, “it’s a unique opportunity to reach new audiences and strengthen our international image”, estimates the town hall, which hopes to sell the postcard of “an open, modern and inclusive city”, in addition to being “a world capital of music”.

The Gourmet Festival 2026 of the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL), in pictures.

1 / 25

The Gourmet Festival 2026 of the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL), in pictures.

Gourmet Festival: le célèbre Malakoff revisité façon street food.