Visitors or visits? Schueberfouer's 'two million' may be a bit much

As part of the International Fact-Checking Day, we invited our users to send in topics they would like the RTL fact check team to investigate. From the many suggestions, the team decided to first look into subjects that relate to the Grand Duchy.

One of the questions concerned the Schueberfouer: Are there really two million visitors at the Schueberfouer every year, no matter how long it runs?

Two million visitors: Is there even such a claim?

A quick online search for the Schueberfouer's attendance keeps turning up the same number: "two million visitors". The claim is listed on the Grand Duchy’s official portal Luxembourg.lu, in the press (here, here, here, and here), and on Wikipedia, which names the same figure for 2010 (here) and for 2024 (here).

Wikipedia even says the two million figure is an average, and in press coverage it has been cited for years as an estimate from the organisers.

Who monitors and publishes attendance figures?

To find the source of the claim, RTL contacted the police and the Grand Ducal Fire and Rescue Corps (CGDIS), as both are usually present on the fairground.

Police spokespeople acknowledged that they sometimes publish attendance numbers for major events in the country, though these are usually based on the organisers' estimates received beforehand – but not for the Schueberfouer.

CGDIS officials provided a similar answer; they do not estimate crowd sizes for such events and referred RTL to the municipality of Luxembourg City.

The fairground operators' association also had no figures, saying that monitoring attendance is not part of their responsibilities and referring RTL to the municipality.

RTL thus contacted the municipality of Luxembourg City. By 2 April the team had received no reply, so an initial and yet-to-be-completed version of this fact check was published.

Confirmation, or rather clarification, came two days after the deadline: the municipality does in fact estimate up to two million visitors every year.

How accurate is the figure

According to City officials, visitors are counted at every entrance to the fairground during official opening hours. They acknowledge that this method cannot deliver precise figures.

"Because there is a lot of movement at the entrances, and although passages are counted as accurately as possible, these counts are not 100% precise", organisers wrote.

Even with this margin of error, the City's departments believe between one and a half and two million visitors come to the Schueberfouer each year.

Visitors or visits?

The municipality's brief reply explains that people are indeed counted, yet it leaves open various questions.

Do the organisers allow themselves a margin of half a million because the counts are imprecise?

By "visitors", do they not actually mean "visits"? Given the counting system, it seems difficult – if not impossible – to filter out how many times the same person attends over the course of the fair.

Despite several follow-up requests, City officials could not provide more details, so this point cannot be answered precisely due to the lack of information.

Conclusion:

Relying solely on the counts as undertaken by Luxembourg City officials, one should probably speak of two million visits rather than visitors, because anyone who enters the Glacis site multiple times in a day – or throughout the entire fair – gets counted each time.

Pinpointing exactly how many unique people attend the fair each year is therefore impossible – unlike at a theme park where you buy a ticket to get in. The organisers presumably allow themselves a buffer of about 500,000 visitors to reflect that uncertainty.

Questions or suggestions for other topics? Contact the RTL Fact Checking team at: faktencheck@rtl.lu.