Justin Kreamer explains Tourism Economics direct visitor spending model

Yep, I can jump in.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Justin Kramer with the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

So I'll start by saying both studies were done by Tourism Economics.

Tourism Economics is a globally renowned organization that does specifically tourism economic analysis.

It's the same organization that, for example, London used when they were reviewing their 2012 Olympics, amongst other...

Recent hosts of the World Cup across the city have also used them as well.

So very reputable organization.

The way that the numbers came to pass, and I'll kind of break it out into pieces here.

So it starts off with identifying what is the direct spending.

So the direct spending is broken up into two different parts.

The first part of it is direct spending from visitors to New York City.

And the way that number is calculated is it specifically looks at two different groups.

It takes kind of a bottom-up approach.

So the first group is how many people attended a match from outside of the region.

And so that number is...

There was 645,000 people who attended the eight matches.

Of that number, 78% came from outside of the New York City region.

So that is 508,000 people.

On top of that, it looks at who attended the official World Cup band zones and related events.

Through that, on top of it, there was another 626,000 people from outside of the region who came to New York.

So this report specifically looks at visitors to New York City, not New York City residents spending, to be clear.

So that's the...

I'm laughing because last time I did this, I was too quiet, so I will try to speak louder.

My apologies.

I feel like I'm eating the microphone now, but this is close to me.

So that's how the visitor numbers were calculated.

Then that information is put into a model that the organization has that looks at typical visitor spending, actual numbers of spending at the MetLife Stadium, et cetera,

and by sector calculates an estimated amount of money that each visitor would spend in New York City.