After taking Monday off for Labor Day, the Joplin City Council returns to work this evening.
KRPS’s Fred Fletcher-Fierro has more.
There have been many news stories focused on international travel returning to pre-COVID-19 levels.
Tonight during the informal portion of the Joplin City Council meeting we’ll get an update on whether those visitors have returned to Joplin and how much they’re spending once there.
According to data available on the city’s website, JoplinMo.org produced by the company behind the Visa credit card, our mainly English-speaking neighbors to the north, just over 23,000 residents of Canada visited Joplin in 2022 spending about 2.1 million dollars.
Averaging about 97 dollars per person.
The second most international visitors to Joplin last year were from Mexico, although significantly fewer at 5,173 spending nearly 1.4 million dollars.
Although they spent significantly more money in Joplin, averaging $269 per person. Rounding out the top five were victors from the UK, Germany and Japan.
The report shows that Joplin had at least one visitor from 118 of the world's 195 counties in 2022.
The informal portion of the Joplin City Council meeting gets underway tonight at 5:15.