Posts tagged tourism
Tourism Spending in the US
27 months ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
I noticed via a recent Mtrip newsletter, that the US Department of Commerce recently released 1st quarter travel and tourism spending numbers and they have some “interesting” numbers to look at. To me, the most impressive data is this chart:
This is a pretty amazing way of showing that in terms of constant dollar spend, the US tourism economy has definitely not recovered and that the uphill movement that we saw through 2010 appears to be plateauing in the first quarter of this year. While that isn’t too amazing, considering rising oil prices and the fact that winters often are slower travel months, what is impressive is that in 2005 dollars, the spend in the first quarter of 2011 has not yet recovered to 2004 levels – yikes!
Also impressive is data found in the detailed report (PDF) in which “recreation and entertainment” spend/quarter can be compared from 2007 to 2011 and it moves from 89,622 to 77,051 (in millions of chained 2005 dollars), which certainly shows that ski resorts and other tourism recreation businesses should still have some serious concerns about the consumer’s pocketbook.
Obviously this report is looking at actual numbers and isn’t forward looking, but among prognosticators there’s some talk of a double-dip recession, and if that were to happen, one has to wonder how much lower the ski jump chart of tourism spending can go.
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Winter Sports and Heart Health
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
According to a recent post in eTurboNews, “Skiers and other winter sports tourists who visit the Alps are at increased risk for heart attack due to low temperatures, high altitude and inadequate conditioning for intense physical exertion…”. The article further clarifies that, “The risk is greatest during the first two days of vacation…”, and that “People planning winter sports holidays in the mountains need to prepare themselves with regular exercise beforehand, the study authors suggested. Once at the resort, they should increase their level of physical activity gradually…”.
This is interesting news to me personally in that my wife used to be a cardiac rehab therapist in an earlier career and I know that she has plenty of tips that would range from the exercise regimen mentioned in the article to eating a heart healthy diet. The data cited in this study is European only, but I would suspect that it should translate to the American winter sports traveller as well, perhaps even more so as most Americans that ski or ride live at or near sea level and the average base level of Western ski resorts is far above (around 7-8,000 feet in CO and UT) the average mean altitude of where heart attacks in the study occurred – 4,429 feet.
Without correlating US data, it’s hard to know for sure if there’s similar trending of heart attacks with winter sports tourists, but it would certainly be easy for ski resorts to offer some basic safety information on heart health in terms of pre-trip exercise as well as acclimating and starting physical exertion at altitude at a moderate pace – perhaps a program along the lines of Go Sun Smart would be a helpful first step?
Additional Note : I wrote this post on the morning of September 6 (I try to schedule a few posts ahead of time to make the writing a bit easier by doing it in batches), our family attended Park City’s annual Miner’s Day parade later that morning and wound up steps away from a person who suffered a heart attack while waiting for the parade to start. I hope the best for that person but the freak timing gave me more thought that perhaps there are some things that tourism locales at altitude could do to help educate their guests on the effects of altitude.
Photo credit: Flick user katz2110
The Best Job in the World?
03 years ago
by Eric Hoffman
in review
While I might think that I have the best job in the world, the marketing people at Tourism Queensland have come up with what a very unique and timely campaign promoting what they say is “The Best Job in the World.” What they’re offering is actually a six month position that requires regular photo and video updates to a blog and pays a nifty AUD$150,000 (just over $100k US) it even includes a lovely sounding 3 bedroom home with private pool and airfare. Here’s their video promoting the job:
It’s a great concept and well executed, but what I really like is how they have such great timing what with the global economy stagnating and people flocking to job and other employment sites both online and offline where Tourism Queensland has posted ads promoting this ‘job’. Check out these samples I found online:
This brings up an idea, why don’t other businesses look to employment ads as a way to target business in unorthodox places – perhaps as a ski resort we could advertise openings for skiers and snowboarders in help wanted placements? Whether or not something like that could work, this approach by Tourism Queensland has certainly created a huge word of mouth campaign – over a thousand news articles within a week – and even crashed the web server that they were using to host the application site. I look forward to seeing how this campaign evolves over the coming months and I think that I’ll have to subscribe to the blogs’ RSS feed to see what the winner really thinks of their job come December!
