Earl Wilson/The New York TimesVisiting Britons Lucy Foulger and Craig Johnson, at left, dropped by Times Square on their wedding day to be crowned New York’s 50 millionth tourists of 2011 by the mayor.Updated 4:42 p.m. | Spending an hour or so with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in Times Square was not part of the plan that Craig Johnson and Lucy Foulger had laid out for their wedding day.
But that was before New York officials decided to crown the British couple the honorary 50 millionth visitors to the city this year. At noon on Tuesday, less than an hour after getting married in Rockefeller Center, Mr. Johnson and Ms. Foulger stood beside the mayor on an overcrowded podium as he giddily announced that the city had drawn its largest annual flock of tourists in 2011.
Surrounded by balloons, placards and electronic billboards flashing “50MM,” Mr. Bloomberg said the city’s estimate of visitors so far this year had surpassed last year’s estimated total of 48.8 million. And by the end of next week, the estimated count for 2011 should rise to 50.2 million, exceeding his goal of reaching 50 million annual visitors by the end of 2012, the mayor said.
Mr. Bloomberg explained that the city’s tourism-marketing arm, NYC & Company, bases its estimates of total visitors on the tallies that are available, including arrivals at the region’s three major airports, hotel occupancies and tickets sales at museums and theaters. The agency’s consultants extrapolate from those figures.
“It’s kind of hard to count them,” the mayor said of all of the people who stay overnight in the city or travel from a few hours away for day trips. “We don’t have somebody at every bridge and tunnel.”
Mr. Bloomberg again proclaimed New York to be the top tourist destination among American cities, even though tourism officials in Orlando have repeatedly claimed that their metropolitan area draws more visitors. They said that Orlando attracted 51.5 million tourists in 2010 and was on track this summer to draw more than 53 million this year. Mr. Bloomberg countered that Orlando’s tourism agency measures an area that extend far beyond Orlando’s city limits and even across county borders.
Promoting the city’s attraction in overseas markets has been one of Mr. Bloomberg’s priorities because foreigners tend to spend more in the city’s hotels, restaurants, museums and stores than the typical domestic tourist does. His office estimates that visitors will spend $32 billion in the city this year and that that spending will spur an additional $16 billion in economic activity as people who work in tourism-related businesses spend the money they take in.
All that shopping and sightseeing is producing “what’s really important in the city: more tax revenues and jobs,” Mr. Bloomberg said. City officials encouraged Mr. Johnson, 33, and his bride, who is 32, to stimulate the local economy by spending and using the bundle of prizes that came with being anointed the 50 millionth.
For agreeing to merge their special day with one of the mayor’s, the couple will receive gift cards and tickets to shows with a face value of considerably more than $25,000. Among the merchants that contributed to the booty were American Express, Travelocity, Bloomingdale’s, FAO Schwarz and the Tribeca Grill restaurant. NYC & Company, which derives its revenue from its corporate members and from allocations of city funds, has agreed to pay any taxes the couple incur on the prizes, but is not assuming the costs of their trip or the wedding, a city official said.
Tourism officials settled on honoring a family from England because the United Kingdom was the No. 1 source of foreign visitors to the city. They chose the Johnsons, who live in Litchfield, largely because of their history with the city: The couple first visited New York 10 years ago, just before 9/11, and stayed in the Millennium Hotel near the World Trade Center.
They were already planning to bring a group of friends and relatives, including their two young children, to New York this week when they were invited to be saluted by the mayor, surrounded by thousands of other tourists from around the world in the pedestrian plaza that never goes dark.
Mrs. Johnson’s mother, Rona Foulger, said she learned of the selection of the couple on Monday. Asked what she thought about all of the hoopla, she uttered the very same sentiment that her daughter had repeated when Mr. Bloomberg invited the Johnsons to address the audience of reporters and onlookers: “Just amazin’,” she said.
Mr. Bloomberg, clearly taken with the bride’s bubbly enthusiasm for all things New York, said, “We don’t do this for everybody that comes but we’d like to if we could.”