Austria, really?

The picture is misleading. You can see that people are focussing on a person standing there. I guess a social media influencer entertained a visit to Vienna. The picture was taken on Graben street in the 1st city borough which is crowded with tourists, but not to that extent.

One has to be determined to see Vienna, the 1st District and whatever one wants regardless of the summer crowds if that in and of itself is no deterrent. The Stephanskirche is normally filled with tourists and tour groups , especially when 2 groups happen to arrive at the same time, but then so what? I go back to Vienna every summer , part and parcel of the trip's itinerary.

I've only visited Vienna in the spring and fall, but I never found it especially crowded. Hallstadt is totally different, it's like Skagway in AK; you couldn't pay me to live there.

The best places in Austria (and most of the EU IMHO) are reached by car and not on the international tourist list.

I visited Salzburg before Easter in late March and was totally manageable. I think most people try to go in either Summer or Winter when all the crowds come out. While the weather was not the greatest, we had rain almost every day, the city was manageable and I got to sit in a lot of wonderful little cafes for Kaffee und Kuchen.. Heaven.

The number of people holding up phones in that photo suggests that it was taken at some kind of special event.

Also, remember the tabloid journalist trick during the pandemic lockdowns - telephoto lenses can make a place look a lot more overcrowded by compressing the apparent depth.

I was a bit surprised too until I saw they were comparing the number of tourists to the number of citizens. Okay, thats valid from their perspective, but from the perspctive of the tourist it really doesnt matter. Real estate is what matters from a tourist point of view. Vienna? Well, the majority probably rarely go much beyond the Ringstraße and that can make for a fairly dense experience. After all the area inside the Ringstraße and the few attractions on the outside edges is something less than 1.5 square miles and Vienna does get somehting like 5 million tourists a year. But the old town and castle district area in Prague is about the same size and they handle over 7 million a year. Hallstatt? A one off exception, althought I have been there when it wasnt crowded. Hallstatt and Salzburg might complain, but a lot of people make a living off the tourism in both cities. Mostly the cities exist because of the tourism.

I think for many of these really touristed locations, the savvy traveler does a bit of research to determine how they can manage the crowds and have a good time. These might include:

*Purchasing tickets in advance to reduce/eliminate some of the lines
*Research restaurants and make reservations.
*Actually go into churches and museums. A prime example, when we were in Bruges, it was shoulder to shoulder people, yet the churches, even the one with the Michelangelo sculpture were lightly visited
*Get up and out by about 7am, to do walking tours and take photos. We did this in Venice, it worked great.
*Stay in the very busy cities you want to visit so you can enjoy the city when daytrippers go home. Yes, it may mean more hotel changes, but its a choice.
*Visit the areas outside of the main tourist areas. There were many parts of Venice and Bruges that had few tourists out and about. It was a good way to see locals doing their day to day activities.
*Take a break during the busiest parts of the day to get lunch, apertivo or relax in your hotel room.
*And of course, travel during off season and shoulder season, although I've been seeing that shoulder seasons are disappearing.

I think there are many, many tourists who do little prep for the cities they visit.

Well the author equates tourist numbers with local populations, then tries to shock those who can’t think through the numbers by saying there are nearly 4 tourists for every Austrian. Well, maybe so, but if you wanted to be informative, as opposed to sensationalizing, you would say that on June 28th the busiest tourist day of the year, there is one tourist in the country for every 10,000 citizens of Austria … or whatever the number really is. But it will be a lot less dramatic sounding than 4 to 1.

And it still comes down to the size of the tourist area. And in this case they are comparing it to the entire country so I would say that "over tourism" what ever that means is not an issue in Austria as a whole.

Based on my observations in Austria con sistently over the years, the constant variable is they are always in the summer, two places come to mind where it is swamped with international tourists and bus tours....Salzburg and certain key sites in Vienna. I've not been to Hallstatt yet, cannot comment there, will have to factor in Hallstatt next summer somehow.

Regardless, this notion of "overtourism" doesn't apply to Austrian cities, not even close. I draw the distinction between local tourists and visitors versus international tourists, including anglophones.

You won't any of that at all when you're in Linz, Graz, or popular historical sites such Bad Ischl. The few times I have been to Bad Ischl true, there were international tourists but the numbers?

Go to Bad Ischl during Kaiser Woche in August, be there on the birthday of Franz Joseph in August , you will see the place is crowded.

In July of this year, I spent 17 nights in Vienna, including a one-day train/boat/bus trip to the Wachau Valley, and then a bit later 4 nights in Graz. The area around the Hofburg within the Ring had considerably more people out and about than I felt could be explained by saying, "Well, it's a populous city." Forewarned by Emily, I wasn't surprised to find a lot of people at the Naschmarkt every time I was in the area during opening hours. There were some individual blocks in the center with busy sidewalks, and a lot of folks were usually around Karlsplatz. Otherwise, the city didn't feel all that crowded outdoors. None of the many, many museums I went to was really problematically crowded, though there were a lot of visitors at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and the comparatively small Schatzkammer had clots of people at some display cases. I don't remember the situation at the Upper Belvedere, the museum where buying a (timed) entry ticket in advance is usually recommended, so it can't have been awful. There were lines outside the "name" cafes, and some District 1 restaurants needed dinner reservations.

Vienna was very hot to miserably hot nearly every day I was in town, so I sort of doubt there were a large number of Austrians traveling to the city for tourism then, and probably a good number of locals had escaped to higher elevations or lakes. Most likely a higher than average percentage of the folks walking the sidewalks were foreigners on pre-scheduled trips. Therefore, I don't know that the city would be less busy in, say, early June than what I saw. In any case, I wouldn't discourage a summer trip to Vienna due to crowding, but I would urge potential visitors to take a hard look at recent years' summer weather statistics on timeanddate.com.

Graz is a lovely city with active streets but apparently few Amercian tourists. It's clearly a popular destination, but nothing felt unpleasantly crowded. I didn't get through my complete list of sights in 3 full days there.