Canadians opened their wallets for Vancouver’s Olympics, Vancouver Sun, 4 Mar 2010 -
“We saw a big surge in spending after Canadian athletes won their gold medals,” said Santo Ligotti, a spokesman for Moneris. Moneris processes about 40 per cent of electronic transactions in Canada, including those of Visa, MasterCard and American Express.
Canadians themselves were the high rollers for total spending, representing 78.4 per cent of all transactions.
Candaians spent most of the money in Canada? Shocker.
Lets say 250K people came for the games. Lets also say none of those people were from Canada. That is about 12% of the GVRD and they did 22.6% of the spending. Not too shabby.
Now I dont know what the region they used for these numbers was so its tough to say if spending in surrey was included.
It’s a good question how many visitors there were from outside Canada. Based on the reported flag sales and the crowds on the streets, I’m not convinced it was that many at all.
The World Cup seems like a way better return on investment for a country than the Olympics.
It would be fairly easy to estimate the numbers of foreign visitors for the games.
For instance, how many more people flew into YVR this February compared with other Februaries?
Nobody is telling.
Like jesse, I don’t think the numbers are as high as most imagine.
But if there were even less visitors than they expected, wouldnt this show that they each spent even more money? It seems to me that 22.6% of spending was done by non-canadians. That seems pretty good, but I also have no idea what a normal Feb is like.