Cajun Coast gets report on tourism stats

More than 2,000 people visited Cajun Coast Visitors & Convention Bureau visitor centers last year, even though one of them was closed for seven months.
That’s among the items in a new tourism brochure with highlights from 2008.
The Morgan City visitor center was closed for a time because of work related to the levee improvement program.
Among the highlights in the brochure:
—6 percent of recorded visitors were from other countries. The No. 1 country of origin was Canada, followed in order by France, Germany and Australia.
—Among domestic visitors, the largest number came from Louisiana, followed by Texas, California, Alabama and Oklahoma.
—The Cajun Coast website, www.cajuncoast.com, logged more than 141,000 page views and 87,000 unique visitors. The top pages were Bikers on the Bayou, Mardi Gras, the Eagle Expo, the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, the BBQ Bash and the events calendar.
—The most popular way to visit the website, by a margin of more than 2-to-1, was a mobile device.
—16 events hosted or assisted by Cajun Coast generated 1,031 hotel room nights and an estimated $309,000 economic impact. Some of the biggest events were the Babe Ruth and Cal Ripken baseball tournaments, the LA Miss Battle of the Border Fishing event, the high school fishing tournament, the Berwick Breakers, and Berwick and Morgan City high school basketball.