We are not anxious to grab the easiest dollar. The tourist dollar alone, unrestricted, is not worth the devastation of my people. A country where people have lost their soul is no longer worth visiting. We will encourage only small numbers of visitors whose idea of a holiday is not heaven or paradise, but participation in a different experience. We shall try to avoid the fate of some of our Caribbean neighbors who have ridden the tiger of tourism only to wind up being devoured by it. Large super-luxury hotels with imported management, materials, and values bring false prosperity with the negative side effects of soaring land prices that kill agriculture, polluted beaches, traffic jams, high rise construction that ravages hillsides and scalds the eyeballs - the very problems that the visitors want to forget.
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By spreading the notion of patriotic tourism, we were able to get much-needed dollars into our economy and preserve jobs,
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We were estimating about $700,000, so we're quite a bit over what we thought we were going to get. We all know what happened to the tourism industry after Sept. 11. Since then, we've been building up again. Now we're almost at pre-Sept. 11 levels.
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Overall, we see the year ahead as one with great potential. The tourism infrastructure is growing, and the region is gearing up for events such as the Beijing 2008 Olympics. We hope that national tourism organizations, policy makers, tourism operators and regional merchants will find this information useful in better understanding travelers' concerns and thereby stimulate even more business for this most exciting part of the world.
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There are some similar aspects to all these communities. There is a robust economy in a couple of key areas -- tourism is a key driver as well as professional services. We view this as yet another external validation of the strength of the Florida economy and, therefore, the strength of our strategic plan to develop the economy.
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Nevada and especially Las Vegas has a very strong tourism-based economy and the tourism industry is highly unionized in Las Vegas. As that sector of the economy continues to grow the union density has kept pace.
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In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.
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The routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life.
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