Rotterdam is booming. The city emerged as a tourist attraction for tourists. In the first five months of this year Rotterdam received 18% more tourists than the same period the year before.
According to Erik Braun, a senior researcher in urban economics at the Erasmus Centre for Urban, Port and Transport Economics, the city can still grow considerably in the field of tourism.
Unlike cities like Venice or Amsterdam, tourism does not focus on a couple of places in Rotterdam. ‘That's the disadvantage of Amsterdam - it's all in one square kilometer’, explains Braun. In Rotterdam, on the other hand, the widely stretched inner city offers opportunities. The growth rates highlight this fact. These numbers are exceptional, when compared with the 6.6 percent growth in the Netherlands as a whole and only 5.5 percent in Amsterdam. But it is not only visible in the growth rates. Nowadays, you can find tourists in more and more places in the city of Rotterdam. This becomes evident from the number of photographs that are made in Rotterdam and which are publicly available.
According to Braun, Rotterdam must become even more popular to ensure that no marketing will be needed any longer to promote the city. Many mass tourists still only go to Amsterdam because it is more popular. Using marketing, part of these tourist will visit Rotterdam as well. However, the Rotterdam-tourist is mainly interested in cities and city trips, not in coffee shops.
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Read the whole article (in Dutch) on RTL Nieuws d.d. 13 August 2018