Orlando News
Being able to move guests at a much faster rate would make vacations smoother and help improve the Orlando experience. “We’ve been working with U.S. Customs & Border Protection on a facial recognition system for international arrivals,” Brown said during Orlando Business Journal’s Feb. 8 Making the Connection: Smart Cities, Smarter Transportation luncheon at the airport. “The next step is to install a camera that actually can take a family at one time and process them in the system.”
“This is a significant milestone in Orlando International Airport’s history because it shows the sustained strength of the Central Florida economy,” says Phil Brown, Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority. “With over 47 million annual passengers and growing, we must continue to plan and build for future growth, following the vision that was established more than three decades ago.”
In a recent meeting, the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority (GOAA) Board voted to position Orlando International Airport (MCO) as the first U.S. airport to fully deploy the U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP) Biometric Entry and Exit Program. The system will be implemented at the 30 MCO gates having international departures and at CBP checkpoints located in the airport’s two Federal Inspection Stations.
Visit Orlando unveiled a new milestone visitation number as it celebrated the 68M people who visited Orlando in 2016. Dedicating this announcement to our visitors, we teamed up with the Orlando tourism community to show our appreciation by saying "Thank You!" in a new and exciting way.
To do this, the Orlando tourism community came together to hand write thousands of thank you cards for a new campaign we're calling #OrlandosBIGThankYou.
February continued building upon January’s passenger growth at Orlando International Airport (MCO) spurred on by unique Central Florida community events such as the NFL Pro Bowl in January and the Daytona 500 in February. Combined rolling 12-month traffic is up 6.41 percent on a total of 42,119,339 passengers
Florida set another record in tourism by welcoming the highest amount of visitors in the state’s history with 112.8 million visitors in 2016. This is the sixth consecutive record year for visitation to Florida, exceeding the previous high of 106.6 million in 2015 by 5.9 percent. Tourism jobs also hit a record high in 2016 of 1.4 million jobs, exceeding the previous record in 2015.
The all-time high, announced by tourism body VisitOrlando, represents a 5.5% rise over 2014 and again means that Orlando is the number one US visitor destination. A major contributor to the increase is the fact that passenger number at Orlando International Airport rose by more than 72%, reaching 38.8million in 2015.
