Our city center on the upswing
For one year now, Graz City Management has been centrally controlled by Holding Graz. After the official relaunch twelve months ago, Mayor Siegfried Nagl and the City Management are now taking stock.
Free shopping trips on Saturdays, video productions, Graz voucher sales records, loyalty campaigns and much more: the list of projects implemented last year for inner-city businesses is long.
Free shopping on Saturdays
Last year (mid-September to mid-December) and this summer, the public transportation system offered free shopping in downtown Graz every Saturday. Thousands took advantage of the free service on Saturdays to get to the city center for a stroll.
Summer in the City
Additional promotions as part of “Summer in the City” provided an impetus for retail and gastronomy in the center of Graz: In addition to the Saturday free ride, these included above all the park action, children’s play streets with live music and the popular sand sculptures. The offers attracted numerous people to the city center, as the figures show: in July and August, for example, around 850,000 people bustled about in the center of Graz, and on peak days in August, an average of 30,000 people were out and about – a similarly high frequency value as before Corona 2019.
GrazGutschein loyalty campaign
In order to sustainably strengthen the businesses after the Corona lockdowns, the city and Holding, together with Citymanagement, launched the loyalty campaign in December 2020. As a thank you for a purchase at GrazGutschein partner businesses, GrazGutscheine were returned – depending on the purchase value. A total of around 13,000 invoices were received, more than 8,000 Graz residents benefited from the campaign and received vouchers worth a total of 150,000 euros back.
Sales record
The “Graz as a Gift” campaign implemented by the City Management also gave a big boost to the sale of GrazGutscheine 2020: in the previous year, more than eight million euros in sales were generated with GrazGutscheine.
Redemption record in 2021
The more than 700 GrazGutschein partners were joined by over 50 new businesses in the first half of 2021. The current figures show that the GrazGutschein is well received by local partners: By the end of August, the GrazGutschein partners booked 5.7 million euros in redemptions – which is already one million euros higher than in the entire year 2020 (4.7 million euros).
Free video productions
To make its own business known to a wide audience, Citymanagement offers downtown businesses the opportunity to present their company in free short videos. More than 50 videos about businesses from a wide range of industries – including pharmacies, hotels, boutiques, dance schools, jewelers or bakeries – have already been published.
Mayor and economics adviser Siegfried Nagl gave a year ago the new direction and shows up contently with the first balance: “The initial situation before approximately one year was certainly not the easiest, were nevertheless the trade, the catering trade as well as the hotel trade by the Covid restrictions partly massively limited. However, through joint actions and measures, many positive things have been achieved for the city center economy, including two records: more than eight million euros in sales of Graz vouchers in the previous year and a redemption record of 5.7 million euros this summer.”
