The Covid-19 pandemic threatened the survival of many Swiss tourism businesses from 2020 onwards. In May 2020, parliament therefore decided to provide additional federal funding for Swiss tourist marketing. This was intended to partially replace the industry’s marketing resources, which needed to get by with much lower revenue from visitors. A good four years later, in December 2023, Switzerland Tourism (ST) brought the recovery programme to a successful conclusion.

Greater resilience thanks to the recovery programme

After four years and a total of CHF 49 million in recovery funds, ST can look back on an extremely positive achievement: the additional budget made available during the global pandemic crisis helped to ensure that the Swiss tourism industry never had to halt its marketing efforts entirely. This enabled demand to be stabilised. Once the lockdowns had ended, federal funding helped tourism to return to its former strength quickly.

Swiss Tourism has demonstrated great resilience. This is proven by the all-time record for hotel overnight stays in 2023. Measures financed by the recovery funds made a significant contribution to this rapid recovery.

ST used the additional funding to conduct marketing campaigns for leisure and business travel in the short- and long-haul markets, as well as rolling out planned campaigns on a larger scale. These included, for example, the extremely successful campaigns with ST ambassador Roger Federer. ST also succeeded in strengthening its presence on various social media platforms, which was crucial in ensuring that Switzerland remained at the forefront of the minds of potential guests as a destination, despite travel restrictions.

Swisstainable, the sustainability movement launched by ST in 2021 is an important pillar for the tourism of the future: Thanks to the additional funding, ST was able to ensure that Swisstainable was promoted effectively as a central theme in all communication campaigns.

Use of recovery funds in 2023

In 2023, a final budget of CHF 9.2 million was made available as a further boost for the upward trend in Swiss tourism. The budget consisted of CHF 6.5 million in additional federal contributions to stimulate demand, CHF 0.5 million of ST’s own funds, CHF 1 million from the ST fund for “contingencies” and CHF 1 million from 2022 campaigns that was unspent, as well as CHF 0.2 million from changes in budget allocation (cross-year projects).

 

More than a third of the funds were used for short-haul markets. The rest of the funds were divided between sustainable tourism development, long-haul markets, the promotion of Business events and city tourism.

ST put the recovery funds to effective use to strengthen the achievement of its various marketing campaigns. These included the following campaigns:

In 2023, reliefs to the tune of CHF 6.5 million were available to tourism partners

For 2022/23, parliament approved an additional 15 million from federal funding (8.5 million in 2022 and 6.5 million in 2023) for direct use for marketing measures in the tourism industry, implemented through ST. These funds were used by ST in marketing to benefit a total of 1,066 tourism partners, based on their turnover in the years 2019 to 2021.

By the time the relief contributions project drew to a close in 2023, 98.6% of the funds had been spent in a targeted manner. Only CHF 215,357.00 remained unspent and was returned to the Swiss Confederation’s exchequer.