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| Record Numbers Through Liberia in March | a |  |
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By Ralph Nicholson Friday, April 11, 2008 A record 60,000 international passengers came through Guanacaste’s Daniel Oduber International Airport last month, more than any other month in the airport’s 30 year history. The figure was 10,000 passengers more than the same period last year (which was also a record) and easily outstripped predictions by aviation officials, who had expected about 56,000 passengers for the month. The airport numbers for March represent an 18.2 per cent increase over the same period last year. Those statistics came on top of still more news that would indicate the tourism sector remains strong, despite the downturn in the United States’ economy. CANATUR, the National Chamber of Tourism, said tourism in general rose by 13.78 per cent in the first quarter of the year. The Chamber said in a press release that 532,000 tourists came to Costa Rica in the first three months of the year, about 65,000 more than the previous year. The Minister of Tourism, Carlos Ricardo Benavides, welcomed the news Wednesday. “The almost 14 per cent growth in 2008 fills me with great satisfaction,” he said in San José. It means the ( US) economic crisis has not had a pernicious effect on tourism; it is a number that any country in the world would wish for.” Mr Benavides told reporters there had been 284,000 tourists who visited Guanacaste. “On average a tourist stays in Costa Rica ten days,” he said. “This is what we want. We believe Costa Rica has a tourism product that is associated with natural riches.” Aviation officials are still expecting 450,000 passengers through Liberia airport for 2008. That would represent a modest ten per cent increase on the previous year. Continental Airlines was the biggest carrier in March with 18,669 passengers — 15,600 of them were via their hub in Houston, Texas. Delta Airlines, which pioneered direct flights into Guanacaste in December of 2002 carried slightly less, 17,236. The airline reported 1860 passengers along its new twice-weekly route to and from John F. Kennedy Airport, in New York. There are now 49 international flights a week, included scheduled air charters, into Liberia airport. Nine of those flights land between 12.55pm and 2:30pm on Saturday — stretching airport facilities to the maximum. The Ministry of Public Works and Transport is currently assessing tenders by national and international consortiums bidding for the right to upgrade and operate the airport under a concession agreement. Canadian, US, Spanish, Chilean and Costa Rican companies are all known to be interested in the tender. The tender document, released in November last year, makes formal the Costa Rica Board of Civil Aviation’s new guidelines which call for the $20 million airport terminal to now be two stories high, and include four covered air bridges, or jet ways, to board and unload passengers. |
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Survey Gives A Glimpse of the Face of Tourism |
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And while the industry can’t tell you their names, a new survey by the Guanacaste Chamber of Tourism is providing an accurate picture of the visitors, long before they land at Liberia Airport. They are, for example, between 30 and 49 years old, invariably North American, probably a professional and about a third earn more than $150,000 a year. They will invariably arrive with a spouse or partner, will spend between seven and night nine in a hotel, and when they get back on a plane to go home, will have spent $2251, not counting their air tickets. In one of the most wide-ranging surveys of tourist activity undertaken in the region, the chamber sought the opinions of 300 passengers boarding planes out of Liberia’s Daniel Oduber Airport. The randomly-chosen passengers, on both scheduled commercial and charter flights, were quizzed on such wide-ranging topics as country of origin, age, income, where they stayed, for how long, what they did while in Guanacaste, and what they didn’t like. One of the biggest pluses says the Chamber, is that 48 per cent of tourists surveyed had visited Costa Rica and enjoyed the experience enough to have returned. But that in itself was also a negative. Two years ago a survey showed tourists spending about $3200 during their stay. Now they are spending nearly $1000 less. “It’s very positive that we have a customer base of returning visitors, but they appear to be learning how to live more cheaply during their stay,” said the Chamber’s Executive Director, Mauricio Céspedes. “Probably the amount of money they spend will continue to go down over the years.” Seventy-four per cent were from the United States and 26 per cent from Canada. Eighty-seven per cent had a university education. Sixteen per cent were retired, 11 per cent were educators, five per cent were doctors and four per cent were lawyers. Seventeen per cent earned more than $150,000 a year, while 18 per cent earned more than $300,000. Surveyors found 40 per cent did not want to talk about money. Not surprisingly, 93 per cent of respondents were in Guanacaste for vacation, and of those, 96 per cent went to the beach. Sixty-six per cent visited a National Park, 27 per cent went surfing, 23 per cent went scuba diving and 13 per cent played golf. But what is pleasing the Chamber most is that 96 per cent surveyed said they would definitely recommend Guanacaste as a tourist destination, and 92 per cent intend to return. “We have a big number of tourists who are returning to the region, and also recommending it to others,” Mr Céspedes said. “We’re very happy with that.” |
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| Turning Everything Green With The Norman Name | a | |
Anil Kothari, the developer behind the Hyatt Regency Azulera Resort and Spa in Guanacaste, has a favorite story about Greg Norman and the first time the champion golfer took a look at the property on which he has agreed to design a course. It was early in 2006, and Mr Norman’s technical advisers from Greg Norman Golf Course Design, were already on-site when their boss turned up. “It was very hot outside, and Greg was suffering from a knee injury at the time,” recalls Mr Kothari. In fact Norman has had knee surgery twice — once in October of 2005 and again in February of 2006. “Coincidentally, I too was having trouble with a bad knee, so I elected to remain in the air-conditioned comfort of the car,” says Mr Kothari. “That man spent the day, running like a rabbit, around the 120-acre property while I waited in the air-conditioning,” he says. “You just don’t get signature developers giving that kind of hands-on treatment. He is that good, and one of the reasons why we are using him.” And it’s that kind of approach to golf as a game that led one newspaper reporter to label Norman as the “Great White Shark” during the 1981 Masters Tournament. More recently he’s taken the same shark-like approach to golf as a business. “A lot of people say to me how do you make one golf course different from another and it is pure and simple – it is the terrain,” Norman said last week, after arriving from Florida by private jet, then helicoptering into Brasilito for a ground-breaking ceremony…another look at the site. “You should always give your golf course its own fingerprint. “How you get that fingerprint is what is here, on the ground,” he says, pointing. “And by taking the least-disturbance approach. The ground actually builds the golf course for you instead of you building the golf course out of the ground. Greg orman is one of the greatest golfers the game has known. He discovered the game at the age of 15 while caddying for his mother during a regular, mid-week round. Just two years removed from that first day at Virginia Golf Club in Brisbane, Australia, Norman was a scratch golfer, averaging par or better each time he played. Six years after that round of golf with his mother, Norman turned professional in 1976. The rest is history and statistics. The British Open Championship in 1986 at Turnberry in Scotland, where he shot a tournament record-tying 63 en route to a five-shot victory over Gordon Brand. And the British Open again, in 1993, where he trailed by one stroke entering the final day and closed with 64 to defeat Nick Faldo by two. In total, Norman has won 86 professional events around the world, including 20 US PGA Tour titles. He spent 331 weeks as the world’s number one ranked golfer, and in 2001 was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. “The people I have met,” Norman answers when asked what the game of golf has done for him. “The game of golf opened many doors and allowed me to go to certain places, like designing a golf course in Costa Rica, like building in St Petersburg, Russia, like building in China, like building in Argentina and Brazil. “It has really given me that opportunity, and the only way I got there was my performance on the golf course.” These days Norman is known as much as an entrepreneur as he is as a golfer. In an extraordinary business story, he has managed to parlay a reporter’s throwaway line — Great White Shark — into one of international sport’s better-known brands. Great White Shark Enterprises, Inc, in which Norman serves as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, is the umbrella company for golf course design, real estate development (Medallist Golf Developments specializes in amenities-focused, lifestyle communities), clothing, food (he has partnered with AAco, one of Australia’s leading beef producers, to market Greg Norman Australian Prime), restaurants, wine (Greg Norman Estates boasts five wines from California, and another six wines from southeast Australia), marketing and even turf. Yes, grass. Established in 1995, Greg Norman Turf Company licenses proprietary turf grasses for golf courses, athletic fields and home lawns. The company owns the exclusive rights for GN-1 hybrid Bermuda grass, a leading golf and athletic field grass throughout the US and other parts of the World. It was the turf used for Super Bowl XXXIII in Miami and XXXV in Tampa, the 1999 World Baseball Series, and the 2000 Summer Olympic Games at Stadium Australia. It’s not just grass. For Norman, it’s all about brand. “…And those people you meet on the way up, the pyramid gets smaller and smaller, and there is a willingness for people to be associated with your success and the marketing of your brand. “I truly believe, my company GWSE has done a good job at that, and that’s why Anil (Kothari) gets attracted to that. I truly believe we add value to him and his development.” It’s an assertion that is hard to argue with. Greg Norman Golf Course Design was established in 1987 in Sydney, Australia. Now headquartered in Jupiter, Florida, it has developed 60 golf courses around the world, and has another 46 courses in progress. Brasilito, Guanacaste is just one of them. “This is a beautiful site,” says Norman, of the land he has now visited three times. “It is diverse, number one. “We are going to capture the views of the ocean, you have enough terrain and topography change, you have a front nine and a back nine very different from each other, from a fairly general flow to something more back up to the hill country.” In fact, Norman says it feels like home, or rather, near where he was born in Mount Isa in Queensland, Australia 53 years ago. “It reminds me a lot of northeast Australia,” he says. “Just look down this coast line and you think you’re going to be anywhere up around north of cairns, or anywhere around that area. I like that feel, some kind of sensitivity to your homeland in some way.” Norman says he already has a feel for what his course will look like — he got that after the first walk-through back in 2006. There will, for example, be four, possibly five, holes with commanding ocean views. Most spectacular will be the 17th and 18th holes. “Seventeen and 18 are going to be dramatic,” he says. “They will drop a couple of hundred feet (about 70 meters), and all the way down you are going to see the ocean, and stuff like that. “You don’t always look for signature holes, they just happen. “It’s pretty neat to actually find some nuances of the golf course, find some specialties, some specimen trees or to find some rock outcrop, or positioning of a green where you can get some dramatic views.” Norman says his team is fully conscious of the environmentally sensitive issues in the area, and while there will be movement of earth, his company adopts a “least-disturbance” policy. “There is going to be some earth movement, no question about it,” he says. “There will be in certain places, obviously. We have to get from the low-lying areas through the gullies and to the back nine. “The trees are important aspects of that, and where land meets sea, you normally get a lot of water coming off the watershed and you have to be sensitive to the flow of that water and if there are any wetlands issues. “Every golf course is a challenge, because you have a lot of expectations to be met —from the developer’s standpoint, from the environmentalists’ stand point, from the point where you maximize the extraction of the dollar out of the whole project. “My expectation is to build the best quality golf course I can out of the land we have been given.” |
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