‘Cultural’ Tourism on the Rise in N.Y.
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The city is attracting an increasing number of visitors interested in seeing more than ground zero and the Statue of Liberty.
The city’s official tourism marketing organization, NYC & Company, said 17.2 million “cultural visitors” – those who arrive to do things such as see plays and visit museums and zoos – came to New York City in 2004.
That total was 1.38 million more than the year before, according to a report released on Saturday at the fifth annual CultureFest in Battery Park.
The cultural tourists, who accounted for 43% of all the city’s visitors, are also spending more: $9.1 billion last year, compared to $8.2 billion in 2003, NYC & Company said.
“For every dollar spent, another 60 cents of indirect spending on goods and services powers the city’s economy in all five boroughs,” the group’s CEO and president, Cristyne Nicholas, said. “This brings the total economic impact of cultural visitors to the city to nearly $15 billion, based on the latest available data, from 2004.”
The number of such tourists is lower than the peak year, 2001, when 17.5 million visited the city, many in the wake of the World Trade Center attack. It is significantly higher, however, than the 15.8 million cultural visitors in 2003, when the SARS epidemic and the war in Iraq dampened international tourism, Ms. Nicholas said.
The weak dollar helped lure 4.28 million foreign cultural tourists to New York in 2004, 1 million more than the previous year, Ms. Nicholas said.
She added that heavy marketing in Britain – where airline competition has led to cheap international flights – contributed to this increase. Also, visitors from Japan – where NYC & Company also strongly advertised – increased, in part because the left fielder for the Yankees, Hideki Matsui, is Japanese and draws many fans to New York, and the architect of the new MoMA, Yoshio Taniguchi, is also Japanese.
International tourism made up about three-quarters of the increase in 2004, Ms. Nicholas said.
Safe streets were another factor behind tourism growth, she said. “When you look at crime trends and tourism, they’re pretty closely linked.”
For 2005, NYC & Company has expanded its marketing campaign to Germany, where the department store Karstadt is offering 20,000 customers free airline tickets to New York. Likewise, “The Gates,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s public art display in Central Park, was a major tourist attraction. “We’re optimistic about 2005,” Ms. Nicholas said.
