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Old 03-21-2017, 10:21 AM
 
4,152 posts, read 7,941,830 times
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Years ago there were motels on Lake Michigan that were pretty nice for their time. Its kinda sad that these are gone and have never been replaced by a nice resort or hotel on the lake. I'm not suggesting cutting into park land but those old hotels were not located in parks and I think some other buildings there are in their place.
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Old 03-21-2017, 10:21 AM
 
Location: St. Louis
2,694 posts, read 3,190,781 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TBideon View Post
If you were to pick one thing that Chicago is most known for, it's crime and corruption, both historic and present. Until that narrative changes, then I don't see it competing with LA, New York, Vegas, Miami, etc.
Chicago already receives several million more tourists than Los Angeles County, 11 million more than Las Vegas, and more than 3x the amount Miami and its immediate surroundings do. The only city you named that gets more tourists is New York.
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Old 03-21-2017, 10:55 AM
 
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Default Not sure what your source is...

Quote:
Originally Posted by PerseusVeil View Post
Chicago already receives several million more tourists than Los Angeles County, 11 million more than Las Vegas, and more than 3x the amount Miami and its immediate surroundings do. The only city you named that gets more tourists is New York.
LasVegas had about 48M hotel room stays, Chicago had about 11M --

Washington DC, NYC and Orlando are also far ahead of Chicago

http://www.lvcva.com/includes/conten...S-YTD-2016.pdf

http://www.choosechicago.com/include...nnual-2016.pdf

http://www.osc.state.ny.us/osdc/hote..._rpt2_2017.pdf

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/busin...502-story.html

http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Articles...jor-US-markets
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Old 03-21-2017, 11:16 AM
 
Location: St. Louis
2,694 posts, read 3,190,781 times
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It isn't measured by hotel room stays though. When cities calculate their visitors it can be people staying at hotels, visiting friends and family, day trips, etc. People stuck on layovers aren't counted though. As for Las Vegas, your source lists their official visitor total as 42.9 million, which is confirmed by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority as their official number of visitors for 2016:
Las Vegas hosted record 42.9M visitors in 2016 | Las Vegas Review-Journal

I also never brought up DC or Orlando, so I don't know why you brought them up. That being said, DC welcomed 21.3 million visitors in 2015 (I can't locate their 2016 numbers), and Orlando is usually the most visited city in the US thanks to Disney.
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Old 03-21-2017, 11:39 AM
 
Location: St. Louis
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I don't think Chicago has released its official overnight vs non-overnight visitor breakdown yet (the 2015 press release is from April of last year, so it probably hasn't happened yet), but we can compare Chicago to LA, for example, by using Chicago's 2015 numbers and LA's 2016.

Los Angeles County had 31.1 million overnight visitors in 2016, and the city of Chicago had 28.49 million overnight visitors in 2015. Not bad.
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Old 03-21-2017, 11:46 AM
 
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Hotel stays is very much a standardized measure that directly translates into legitimate revenue. "Visitors" can mean anything Rahm wants it to, from people cheering for a Cubs Championship to folks getting lunch at Taste of Chicago and as such is not really something that can given much weight.

Cities like San Fransico, Dallas, and Houston all pull in LOTS of conventions that used to come to Chicago -- https://www.statista.com/statistics/...on-centers-us/

Chicago is never going to have the kind of revenue from conventions and such that true tourist destinations do and the shrinking pool of tradeshows continues to make one wonder how much "investment" in McCormick Place is about taking care of fatcat insiders vs good use of limited resources in the city...
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Old 03-21-2017, 11:50 AM
 
Location: St. Louis
2,694 posts, read 3,190,781 times
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Visitors is the metric that all the cities are using when their tourism numbers are reported. If you want to disregard them, then that's your prerogative. What it is not, however, is a made up term by Rahm.
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Old 03-21-2017, 12:10 PM
 
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Default Really?

Quote:
Originally Posted by PerseusVeil View Post
Visitors is the metric that all the cities are using when their tourism numbers are reported. If you want to disregard them, then that's your prerogative. What it is not, however, is a made up term by Rahm.
Cubs parade crowd estimate a guesstimate, experts say - Chicago Tribune
Quote:
By Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communication's count, an estimated 5 million people lined the 6-mile parade route and gathered at the rally in Grant Park. But — like other official crowd counts — there's reason to be skeptical, experts say.

"The guesstimates are almost always vast exaggerations," said Clark McPhail, a sociology professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Politics often play a factor in overblown crowd counts. Run
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Old 03-21-2017, 12:46 PM
 
Location: St. Louis
2,694 posts, read 3,190,781 times
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You seem to be under the assumption that only Chicago is susceptible to fluctuations due to sports wins or festivals or to incorrect crowd size estimates. That's hardly the case, but by all means do keep trying to move the goal posts. Additionally, Chicago was already in excess of 50 million visitors in 2015. It's certainly possible there will be a drop in 2017 numbers. However, the overnight figure I quoted in my previous post is from 2015, not 2016. It's before the World Series win.
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Old 03-21-2017, 01:14 PM
 
28,453 posts, read 85,379,084 times
Reputation: 18729
Default You assume that "visitors" equate to "destination"...

Quote:
Originally Posted by PerseusVeil View Post
You seem to be under the assumption that only Chicago is susceptible to fluctuations due to sports wins or festivals or to incorrect crowd size estimates. That's hardly the case, but by all means do keep trying to move the goal posts. Additionally, Chicago was already in excess of 50 million visitors in 2015. It's certainly possible there will be a drop in 2017 numbers. However, the overnight figure I quoted in my previous post is from 2015, not 2016. It's before the World Series win.
The reason I cited HOTEL STAYS is that is the most reliable metric available of where people are SPENDING TOURISM DOLLARS.

The thread clearly asks what is need to make Chicago compete with TOP TOURIST DESTINATIONS. The simple answer is that is NOT possible and frankly anybody who things about what this would mean should also realize it is neither necessary nor desirable.

I completely agree that as part of a very large super-regional area it is FINE to have lots of people from surrounding states make day trips into Chicago for various professional sports games or to join in a celebration that was about a century in the making with the Cubs. What is not possible is for Chicago to manage to be a good location for business AND triple / quadruple the number of hotel stays that it has in a way to "compete" with LasVegas, Orlando, DC, NYC...

At some level it is foolish to even dream of such things as the massive expansion of not just hotel rooms but also infrastructure at the airports and transit throughout the city to support such increases is just not feasible.

If you think "visitors" coming from Cicero or Merrillville or Kenosha are really pumping up the ability of Chicago to fill the gaping holes in the CTU retirement fund, ensure there are enough cops to keep bangers from offing one another, or even patch up crumbling roads all I can say is your optimism is astonishing.
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