Austria winner

Landstraßer Hauptstraße: Silent shopping favorite

(Bild: Martin Jöchl)

The surprising winner in a comparison of 24 shopping streets and other shopping centers in the 20 largest cities and 16 selected small towns in Austria is Landstraßer Hauptstraße. In terms of growth in retail space, it even outperforms Vienna's city center.

Landstraßer Hauptstraße has now scored a surprise victory over 23 other shopping streets throughout Austria: According to the annual "City Retail Health Check" by the consulting firm "Standort + Markt", it is the shopping street with the largest increase in retail space within the last ten years - and it has bucked the trend to boot.

Loss of 9000 square meters in just one year
While Landstraßer Hauptstraße now has 6.5 percent more shopping space than ten years ago, shopping space is shrinking almost everywhere else. According to the study, 9,000 square meters of shopping space were lost across Austria last year alone, especially in fashion retail. Over the last ten years, this figure has even risen to 100,000 square meters. Online retail and inflation are cited as the main factors behind this.

Hannes Lindner (Markt + Standort), Rainer Will (Handelsverband) and Roman Schwarzenecker (Markt + Standort)(Bild: Leadersnet / Daniel Mikkelsen)

The declines are drastic in some cases: St. Pölten, for example, now has 28.1 percent fewer shopping facilities than ten years ago, Wiener Neustadt 20.9 percent fewer and Steyr 17.9 percent fewer. However, you don't necessarily have to be a big city like Vienna to score points: Dornbirn (up 5.9 percent) and Leoben (+1.4 percent) also stood out positively with an increase in shopping space.

Vienna's city center also performed well with a 2.7% increase in retail space. However, Austria's largest shopping street remains undisputedly Mariahilfer Strasse with 210,500 square meters of retail space - almost twice as much as the whole of Innsbruck. But even here, the supply has shrunk by six percent over the last ten years.