Tourism will generate 6.6 million new jobs in 2003 thanks to a 6% uplift in demand

Madrid._ The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) foreboded the leisure industry and those economic sectors indirectly linked to it will churn out 6.6 million new jobs worldwide in the year 2003, thanks to the fact that demand will score a groundbreaking 6% growth.

In February 2004, these sectors will be bouncing back to the same employment levels registered before 9/11, said Jean-Claude Baumgarten, chairman of this association of tourism professionals.

The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington prompted the suppression of 10 million jobs in the whole wide world on the heels of a 7.4% slide in demand, according to statistics reckoned by the WTTC’s research center, an organization founded in 1990 and bankrolled through private funds.

Travel and tourism stand for 10% of the world’s Gross National Product (GNP) and employs 200 million workers. Last March, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) portended that international tourism will definitely stage a comeback in 2002, with an increase in the number of worldwide travels somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 4 percent as compared to the year 2001.