The future of the European Bike Week is currently being negotiated!
Vote at the end of the post!
The European Bike Week needs new contracts and as you could just read in the Austrian edition “Kleine Zeitung”, all that would be missing is the approval of the tourism committees.
According to Harleysite information, that's not all that's missing! from internal circles at Harley-Davidson that there is a lot of dissatisfaction among exhibitors about the controls by the financial authorities. It's not that you don't want to pay taxes, but the effort that goes into it is very unusual. Sometimes employees had to present training certificates, or they blocked the shop for several hours and in the end didn't even find anything great, as happened to a motorcycle bag dealer.
Modern and preventive solutions are in demand!
If this continues and administrative solutions are not worked on here to clarify everything online in advance or to be able to state that, at some point Harley-Davidson will lose the exhibitors when they have to take into account thousands of euros in fines as a precautionary measure because some certificate was missing, or an employee stepped in at short notice and did not have all the papers with a complete legend up to the journeyman's certificate.
Controls slow down exhibitors!
Then there are the sometimes questionable police checks, where the officers from the Vienna districts who are called in for the European Bike Week are particularly noticeable. It's clear that controls have to be carried out, but there doesn't seem to be any sense of proportion here. Everything should stay within limits, not every local resident earns a lot of money from the event and they should still be welcomed. Now we have a lot of unhappy exhibitors and more and more unhappy visitors, all of whom bring a lot of money to the region as they are. According to “Kleine Zeitung” we are talking about over 30 million euros a year.
Nothing has been signed yet!
According to Harleysite information, from Harley-Davidson's perspective the contracts are not yet ready to be signed! What many people probably don't have on their radar is the beautiful city of Prague, which saw what's going on in the region at the 115th Anniversary Party when the Harley bikers come to celebrate.
Prague is beautiful too!
Since then, the Prague Harley Days place every year shortly before European Bike Week under regional leadership. They would like more, as I found out during my visit to the Prague Harley Days last year. In addition, a high-ranking delegation from the Harley-Davidson management level was also in Prague just a few months ago, no further details are known. The European Bike Week can theoretically take place anywhere in Europe where the 30 million euros from us are welcome.
And if the 120th Anniversary Party in Budapest goes well, we might have one more applicant on board for the European Bike Week, because Budapest isn't really that far away and especially not when you see how great the interest in Budapest is at the moment . So let's see what comes out of it, you're welcome to leave your vote in the voting!
This year, the European Bike Week definitely take place from September 5th to 10th, 2023 .
What do you think, your vote counts here!
Text and image credit: Harleysite 2023
