Tourism reaches record levels ... in NYC. Where do we find such data for DC?

Who doesn't love NYC?

Today's NY Post reports, in "N.Y.'S OPEN ARM$ ," about record numbers of tourists visiting NYC. From the article:

Tourists are flying into New York and sleeping in its hotels in record numbers, tourism officials giddily announced yesterday. The hotel-occupancy rate normally hovers around 80 percent for New York City in June. This year, it reached 90.4 percent, the highest ever for the month. Crunch the numbers and you get about 57,000 booked hotel rooms per night. "When we have record occupancy in hotels, that translates into people actually feeding their families. It just goes through the whole economy," Mayor Bloomberg said at yesterday's press conference celebrating the reopening of a tourist kiosk in City Hall Park.

October is usually the busiest month for the city's hotel industry, mostly due to high business travel and the mild fall weather, officials said. The highest occupancy rate ever — 94 percent — was recorded in October 1996. For the record, there are more than 70,000 hotel rooms in the city, which recently set yet another record — for airport arrivals. From January to April, more than 15 million people landed at JFK, La Guardia and Newark airports — nearly 5 million of them from outside the country. (...)

In a pitch to get even more tourists to visit, the city has partnered with The History Channel to promote New York's rich legacy. The cable network will pump about $19.5 million into several projects, including free TV ads, historic walking and trolley tours — and a chance for five people to win three-day trips to the Big Apple. The ads are to run nationally — and reach the station's 88 million viewers — over the next 31/2 years. On Aug. 15-19, The History Channel will run nightly shows about New York landmarks.
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About two months ago I sent a query with similar questions to the Washington Convention and Tourism Authority. Still no response. And I continually compare the pretty lackluster www.washington.org tourism site to much better efforts elsewhere, such as the NYC tourism promotion website or even Destination Winnipeg (Manitoba!).

Where's DC's campaign with History Channel or Travel Channel?

Tourists determinedly taking Washington.

There needs to be a tourism "economic development and management" plan as well as a "cultural resources development and management" plan for the City. And they need to be available, just like the various Office of Planning or DC Department of Transportation Plans and Studies are online.

I wrote about this a lot last fall on H-DC, in a thread that discussed the closing of the City Museum. I will dig up, edit and repost some of that writing here.