Hosting America's Cup races are a fair deal. Research commissioned by the New Zealand Minister of Tourism showed the America’s Cup brought $523 million into Auckland and the rest of the country, creating a total of 9,360 years of full-time work. Several different factors contributed to this amount, one of the most important being the sale of services to the many mega yachts which came to watch the competition. That alone yielded $155 million. Valencia beat Marseilles, Porto and Naples to host this year's America’s Cup and undertook to invest a billion Euro ίn the city's infrastructure to do so. Of this figure, 600 million euro should be earned back by the city council thanks to the services it is providing to the consortia. The rest should be generated by luxury tourism.
Τhanks in no small part to a strong Euro, edition ίn fact brought revenues of around $529 million. And that was in 2003. Four years of the same story is repeating itself but this time analysts are predicting revenues of 5 billion Euro. Α study carried out by IVIE (Instituto Valenciano de lnvestigaciones Economicas) calculated that they generated around 70,000 new jobs. Valencia is also pulling out all the stops in a creative ferment that will yield some new architecture. Property prices are soaring. Last year the number of passengers coming through its airport doubled. In 2003, it had three five star hotels but now it has 15. Huge investments have been made in modernising the city's infrastructure too and it is expected that the Cup will bring in 70 million Euro to the tourist trade.
Nothing wrong at all with this scenario if you consider that it's all happening against an already rosy backdrop. Tourism in Spain is on a roll and accounts for 11% of the GDP and 12% of jobs.
