Hot off the presses. The latest Statcan International Travel: Advance Information for November 2007 is a total Fiesta en Español. Inbound tourism to Canada from Mexico was up an excellent 31.6% compared to November 2006. Inbound tourism to Canada from Spain was up a whopping 43.6%! Not bad at all for a slow month like November. It's looking good for December numbers when it comes to Spanish speaking visitors to Canada. South America, not counting Brazil (not a Spanish speaking country, although with many cultural similarities), was up a decent 14.1% Adding up all Spanish speaking tourists (as close as we can get to add them up, since we don't know how many US Hispanics visit Canada) based on the Statcan bulletin (i.e. including Spain, Mexico and South America) the total figure for Jan to November 2007 is 374,160 visitors - more than visitors from Germany or France in the same period. Since I'm an online entrepreneur, I see my main market as Spanish speaking no matter where they live. Traffic to my Spanish language sites comes from every country where Spanish is spoken. So I am very pleased with these numbers.While the numbers are great when it comes to Spanish speaking visitors, this does not make up for the continuing decline from US visitors (just over 24 million to Nov '07). A 13% drop in Nov '07 from Nov '06 adds more concern to the issue. Much of the strength of our industry depends in good measure from US visitors and their current economic woes do not bode well for '08.
(International Travel Advance Information)Let's see how the year ended. Numbers for December should come out in a month's time.
Olé
Jaime
(photo: me on the right with my friend Joaquin, a Spanish/Canadian from Andalucía, in Muskoka, Ontario last summer).
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