Monday, January 15, 2018
Today Choose Chicago and the mayor of this place, Rahm Emanuel announced that visitors to the city had reached about 55.2 million in 2017 that is a brand new record marking a rise of 2.5% over the previous year.
The increase of 1.4 million reaches the ambitious goal of 55 million visitors annually.
The tourism industry of Chicago had supported an estimated 146,500 jobs in 2017 marking a 17% rise since Mayor Emanuel assumed office. Mayor Emanual said that tourism in Chicago implies that greater job opportunities would be pumped into this place, in its different regions.
Before the year 2011, there was approximately 124,400 tourist-related positions.
The estimated 55.2 million travellers to Chicago in 2017 had ended up generating as many as 22,000 jobs.
The year 2017 had marked another important rise in leisure visitors to the city as Chicago hotels. The hotels reported an overall rise of 6.3%. Such an increase of the leisure segment was especially strong in the key summer months as hotels had reported an increase of 7.4% in the four-month period in June through September that is more than double the growth of the previous summer.
Overall, Chicago hotel demand in terms of rooms occupied had risen by 3.3% in 2017.
Another crucial segment generating overnight visitors is the convention meetings industry that convened at McCormick Place. Of the largest 40 conventions held, 21 were able to achieve increased attendance over their prior year event and this includes 10 that had experienced all time attendance records.
Seven of the 40 largest conventions had broken previous records in terms of the sale of exhibit space and this is one of the smartly emerging industry trends.
To add to the progress, the Global Business Travel Association is planning to host their Annual Convention in July of 2019 that is the world’s largest business travel event.
Over 7,000 business travel professionals from around the world would be gathering in Chicago at McCormick Square for exclusive networking opportuni8ties on the fresh innovations in the industry.
This positive momentum generated is also helping fuel the industry growth as Chicago had opened five new hotels in 2017 and another eight new hotels are scheduled to open in 2018.
Tags: Chicago, mccormick place, rahm emanuel
