Expo 67 (opening Week) - Record Crowds

Record Crowds

In the first three days alone, over a million visitors attended the fair. On Sunday, April 30, Expo 67 had its busiest day of the entire fair: 569,500 people strolled through its gates, setting an all-time, single-day attendance record for World's Fairs, that still stands as of 2007. Attendance figures were significantly more than originally anticipated by the Stamford Research Institute, an American firm hired in 1963 by the Expo Corporation to be its foreign-based advisors. The institute predicted back in the initial planning stages, that only 12 million people would attend for the entire six months that it was open. In actuality, almost that many visitors attended in its first month. This was the same institute that ran a computer analysis that claimed Expo could not be built in time. Like the computer analysis before it, the report was ignored by the Expo corporation, which then promptly fired the institute and did their own attendance forecasts in 1964 that were also low, but closer to reality. Expo 67 would go on to have over 50 million visitors by October 29, 1967, making it the third best ever attended World's Fair of the 20th century.