COLUMBUS – Tourism has become a $42 billion industry, which employs one out of every dozen working Ohioans, according to an annual report from TourismOhio released Wednesday.
An estimated 207 million people visited Ohio during 2015, an increase of 7 million from 2014, about 20 percent of them staying overnight, according to research conducted by Longwoods International and Tourism Economics.
About 420,000 Ohioans – or about 8 percent of the total number of Ohioans working in 2015 — held jobs the report says are supported by tourism, an increase of 8,000 jobs from the year before.
Time was money: The report showed the 41 million overnight visitors spent an average of $354, more than three times the $110 spent per day by daytrip visitors.
Those additional trips yielded an estimated at $33 billion in direct spending, $2 billion more than the previous year, and generated approximately $42 billion in sales, up from $40 billion in 2014.