Tijuana To The World

And you don’t really need tourist offices on every continent to attract them:

New York City has started to slide into the economic downturn that is enveloping much of the country. But the city has a counterbalance against recession that few other American cities share: a rising tide of free-spending foreign visitors.

After a record year of tourism and business travel in 2007, the influx has continued to grow this year, city officials said. About one million more visitors came to the city — more than one fifth of them foreigners — in the first three months of 2008 than in the first quarter of last year, according to a preliminary estimate from NYC & Company, the city’s marketing arm.

Foreign tourists are filling up the tables at the city’s pricier restaurants. Danny Meyer, who operates several highly rated restaurants in Manhattan, said that he added the Euro equivalent to prices on the wine list at the Modern, the restaurant in the Museum of Modern Art, to impress upon tourists what bargains the bottles were.

The device worked: “We have sold more wines and more expensive wines,” Mr. Meyer said.

. . .

Mike Stengel, who oversees five full-service Marriott hotels in the city, said that guests were coming from all over the globe, attracted by a weak dollar and New York’s polished-up image overseas. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Stengel ate breakfast at the Marriott Marquis with 15 travel agents from China, only five of whom had been to the city before.

After breakfast, the group was going to go shopping at Woodbury Common, an outlet mall an hour north of the city. To get there, Mr. Stengel said, the group planned to walk, unescorted, the six blocks from the hotel to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and catch a public bus, a venture around Times Square that he said a tour group would not have considered four or five years ago.

. . .

On Broadway, attendance and revenue are off only slightly from last year, even after a three-week strike by stagehands last fall, according to the Broadway League. But some shows, including “Wicked” and “Jersey Boys,” are still filling all of their seats at average ticket prices of more than $100.