Berlin, 10 June 2010 For just under four days not one single passenger plane landed at the Berlin airports because of the volcanic ash cloud hovering over Germany.

Despite this, more visitors came to the city during the month of April in 2010 than during the same month the previous year. According to information from the Berlin-Brandenburg Statistics Office, 722,900 guests were registered in the accommodation sector in the city, an increase of 5.3 percent. The number of room nights climbed by 6.2 percent to almost 1.7 million.

“The positive results achieved despite the major restrictions on air travel surprised us too”, says Burkhard Kieker, CEO of Berlin Tourismus Marketing GmbH. "They confirm the stable nature of the growth that we have observed in recent months in the Berlin travel sector.”

From within Germany 464,000 guests travelled to Berlin in April, a rise of 4.9 percent. They spent around one million nights in the hotels and guest houses in the German capital generating an increase of 4.4 percent. 258,000 visitors to Berlin came from abroad (+6%). The number of nights they spent in the city on the river Spree rose by 9 percent to 681,700.

Whilst Berlin continued to be popular in April with guests from Russia (+41,5%), Poland (+36%) and Great Britain (+15,1%) the effects of the ban on air travel were felt very markedly in particular on overseas markets. There were far fewer guests from the USA (-5,2%) and Israel (-19,8%).

In April visitors to the German capital had approximately 110,700 beds at their disposal in the accommodation sector. The number of hotel beds has thus risen by 9 percent.

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