The ITB Berlin (International Tourism Exchange Berlin), the world’s largest travel exhibition, will be held at Messe Berlin from 11th to 15th March. This year it will focus on “business travel in times of crisis”. For five days the whole world will meet at ITB Berlin: people who want to find the perfect destination and people working in the travel industry. Turkey is co-hosting this year’s ITB Berlin Convention.

Business travel has become as important as leisure travel and now it has become a fruitful pillar of the travel industry. For this reason, ITB Berlin focuses on the newest sector trends, its concepts and corporation possibilities. Another dominant feature of the 2009 ITB Berlin is “the European Capital of Culture RUHR 2010”. ITB Berlin’s director declared that ‘despite the difficult global economic situation, in 2009 demand still exceeds supply’, which will probably be noticed in the fair’s participation.
ITB Berlín 2009 will present a whole range of travel deals: tour operators, destinations, booking systems, communication & information systems providers, hotels and any thing a company or traveller could need. So it represents the perfect platform for companies and institutions of the whole travel world.
It will focus on all kinds of tourist segments: trends and events, cultural tourism, youth travel, economy accommodation, ECO tourism, experience adventure and expeditions, training & employment in tourism, travel technology, wellness, cruises and reservations..

Year after year, the ITB Fair in Berlin has gained prestige along with visitors. This edition will beat its attendance record with 11,000 exhibiting companies and organisations from around 180 different countries. It attracts nearly 125,000 visitors every year. This edition of ITB will house 35 exhibitors just for hotel fittings, sales promotion & advertising, organisational materials and services.
ITB Berlin is the perfect forum for conducting business and guarantees high-quality customer contacts. It also tries to produce links between markets and societies, companies and travellers and research and science.

There are many reasons for not missing ITB Berlin 2009, whether you have a travel company or not: during five days all the private visitors will discover new tourism trends and they will be able to get inspiration for their holidays. For the professionals, this fair gives the opportunity to promote itself because the organisation undertakes the corporate social responsibility as an overarching concept for sustainable corporate development in tourism.

Rent Apartments in Berlin to spend these days in the city of Berlin. It is surely the best option for a pleasant stay in the German capital. Enjoy the fair!

Ostalgie: discover the life of the past

If you think that you already know Berlin, because you have visited a lot of times the German capital, then I´m sure that you can tell me what is the vita-cola, ampelmännchen oder Trabant. Ah, no, you can´t? Well, the fact is that you are completely wrong. Come on, come to Berlin and enter in the world of Ostalgie!

The 9th of november the Germans celebrate the 20th birthday of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and so as well the German reunification. This day is a very important incident in Germanys history of which a lot of Germans of the ancient East are thinking about very emotionally. However, the yearning for the life in the German Democratic Republic, that means especially for its products, is growing. During the last years there was established a new kind of trend, the so called Ostalgie. It is a portmanteau of the German words Ost (east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia). In the media, press, television, radio and in a lot of magazines you can find reports and documentaries about the life in the GDR. Switch on the TV, watch the programme called “Ostalgie Show” and let you travel back to the world of old East Germany. Although the Germans are very proud to live in a reunified nation, there still exist some cultural differences between the East and the West which mark the German society.

You won´t need much time to find shops where you can buy products of the Ossis. In the German capital is a huge amount of shops where you can buy besides the typical GDR Tschirts, authentic products from the period betwenn 1949 and 1990: the famous Spreewaldgurken (cucumber), the coffee brand Mocca Fix Gold, original uniforms of the ancient National People´s Army, the big Russian fur caps, one of the oldest cleaning agent Ata-Scheuermittel, and even you can buy the orginal shopping paper bags “Gut eingekauft”. All of these products enjoy a huge acceptation in the reunified Germany. As you can see, the offer of East articles is very expanded, starting with food, over clothes and household articles, withing books, CDs or movies: Berlin has everything!

If you want to discover the cosmopolitan city in a different way, why don´t you do a Trabbi-Tour? The Trabant, also known as Trabbi, is a very cheap car which was the most common vehicle in the GDR. The people couldn´t choose between a lot of automobile models, and the Trabbi was the cheapest one. For buying a Trabbi, they had to be registered in a list and sometimes the people had to wait for 10 years…or they just went to the black market. Nowadays, the Trabbi is very worshiped and Berlin gives you the posibility to rent this historical car to discover the German capital and its spectaculars monuments.

For getting to know every single important detail in your trip through the ancient East of Germany, why don´t you visit the DDR-Museum? It’s an interactive museum in the Berlin district of Mitte where you can discover through the different expositions the life of the Ossis (denomination for the habitants of the GDR). It is divided into 17 thematic expositions, like for example, the products, the STASI (Ministry for State Security), education, frontier, culture, trips and holidays etc. Moreover it’s a museum where you can act and touch, that means, you can walk through the original kitchen, open the cupboard of the bedroom and take some clothes or you can take a seat in a Trabbi: in this museum you have the feeling of being in a real original flat of the GDR.

If you still aren’t convinced about visiting Berlin, sit back and relax on the couch and watch the famous movies Good bye, Lenin! or Sonnenalle, films which show you the way of life in the GDR. You surely won’t wait any longer to book your flight to the German capital. And to relax a little bit from your trip through the East of Germany, why don´t you rent one of these comfortable apartments in Berlin?