Popularity
Since the festival is held around the time of Dominicas Independence celebrations, patrons and visitors to the island are afforded numerous opportunities to sample the local cuisine and get an appreciation of the rich cultural attributes of The Nature Island. The popularity of the festival is seen through the rapid growth in the number of patrons attracted each year since 1997, hailing from North America, the French Caribbean, the USVI's, the UK and from OECS and CARICOM countries. From an initial 10,000 paid patrons at the first production, the festival witnessed a total attendance of well over 25,000 in 1999. This has meant a subsequent increase in hotel occupancy, government taxes, visitor expenditure, and important linkages to the various sub-sectors of the tourism industry, including the restaurant, transportation, art and craft among others.
Read more about this topic: World Creole Music Festival
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“In everything from athletic ability to popularity to looks, brains, and clothes, children rank themselves against others. At this age [7 and 8], children can tell you with amazing accuracy who has the coolest clothes, who tells the biggest lies, who is the best reader, who runs the fastest, and who is the most popular boy in the third grade.”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)