BUSINESS BRIEFS
2006 top year for visitors
Advertiser Staff
The final state tourism statistics confirmed that 2006 was another record-breaking visitor year, according to the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.
The department yesterday released the 2006 Annual Visitor Research Report, which presents the agency's final audited statistics on the Hawai'i visitor industry's performance in 2006 and provides a comprehensive comparison with 2005 data. Some 7.56 million visitors traveled to the state, up from 7.4 million in 2005. Visitor spending rose 4 percent to $12.4 billion, and visitor days rose to 69.2 million, according to state Tourism Liaison Marsha Wienert. All figures are records.
HAWAI'I GUIDES IN ASIAN TONGUES
The Hawai'i Visitors and Convention Bureau is trying to make it easier for meeting planners to market the Islands with planning guides translated into four Asian languages.
The bureau recently unveiled a new guide that serves as a one-stop shopping tool for the booking of meetings and corporate events. To make it more convenient for users, the guide can also be viewed online at www.MeetHawaii.com.
The new planning guides have been translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese traditional script for Taiwan, and Chinese simplified characters for China. The foreign language guides will be introduced this year.
ROCKET FIRM'S PROJECT STALLED
Rocketplane Kistler Inc. has laid off some employees and told some suppliers to stop working on a proposed reusable rocket to serve the International Space Station, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The closely held Oklahoma City firm has failed to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars required to keep the project on track and remain eligible for further U.S. government assistance.
Kistler also has been developing a so-called spaceplane, targeted partly at providing suborbital flights for tourists and launching from Hawai'i and other sites.
