Record year for Yellowstone visits

Record year for Yellowstone visits

CODY, Wyo.

Yellowstone National Park has set a record in 2015 with its total number of visitors surpassing 4 million.

The Cody Enterprise reports that the National Park Service says the record total of 4,097,710 visitors is up more than 16 percent from 2014, putting last year at the highest visitation year on record.

The National Park Service attributes the record year to lower gas prices as well as its public awareness campaign, marketing and tourism promotions by the states of Montana and Wyoming.

Park welcomes record visitors

MOOSE, Wyo.

Grand Teton National Park welcomed a record number of visitors last year.

Park officials tallied 4.6 million visits in 2015, an 8.2 percent increase from the previous record of 4.3 million visits set in 2014. The biggest increases came in September and October, when visitation went up 18 percent and 12 percent, respectively, from the previous year.

The increased visitation had a significant effect on park resources, staff and facilities.

Park managers say they expect visitation to increase again this year because of the National Park Service centennial.

Geography quiz

Q. Which country is not in the Southern Hemisphere: South Africa, Uruguay or Panama?

A. Panama. The Central American country, which sits on an isthmus between North and South America, is at about 9 degrees north latitude.

LA tourism

LOS ANGELES

Los Angeles has set a tourism record for the fifth year in a row.

Mayor Eric Garcetti and the city’s tourism board say 45.5 million people visited the city last year – up by nearly 3 percent or about 1.3 million visitors from 2014.

International visitors accounted for 6.7 million tourists, and the number from China grew by 13 percent to around 800,000.

Garcetti has set a goal of attracting 50 million annual visitors to Los Angeles by 2020.

Egypt hopes to boost tourism

VALLEY OF THE WHALES, Egypt

Egypt has unveiled what it says is the Middle East’s first museum dedicated to fossils. It showcases an early form of whales, now extinct and known as the “walking whale.”

The museum opened last week near the Fayoum Oasis south of the capital, Cairo. It’s the latest effort by authorities to attract much-needed tourists, driven away by recent militant attacks.

The centerpiece of the Fossils and Climate Change Museum, is an intact, 37-million-year-old and 20-meter-long skeleton of a legged form of whale that shows how modern-day whales evolved from land mammals.

Strong start

CONWAY, S.C.

The new year seems to be starting well for the tourism industry in Myrtle Beach.

Researchers with the Brittain Center for Resort Tourism at Coastal Carolina University say their sample of hotels, condo-hotels and campsites along the Grand Strand shows that occupancy in the week that ended Jan. 2 was up 35 percent over the same week a year earlier. Revenue per available room, a key indicator of the health of the tourism industry, was up about 60 percent.

Myrtle Beach is the heart of South Carolina’s $18 billion tourism industry.

Combined dispatches