Cross River has identified the many benefits of the Calabar Festival extravaganza 2024, which showcased the richness of Calabar culture.
With the theme: ‘Our Shared Prosperity’, the 2024 Calabar Carnival lasted for 32 days, featuring a wide range of activities and events.
Some of the notable events included the Christmas Tree Lighting, Carnival Calabar Dry Run, Calabar Food Festival, and the Carnival Calabar Parade of the Bands.
The festival featured a range of activities, including music performances, cultural dances, fashion shows, and sports competitions.
Calabar international Airport (between the period 1st November, 2024 and 29th December, 2024 recorded over 10,000 inbound passenger and 79% of the passengers were visiting from other states of Nigeria, 3% from diaspora majorly for Leisure and to attend the Carnival Calabar.
The figure rose from 7,452 recorded in 2023 within the same period to over 10,000 as recorded in 2024. An estimated visitor’s influx of 150,000 was observed to have visited Calabar in December, 2024 through road (89 per cent), Air (7 per cent) and through the sea (4 per cent). An estimated 8.875 billion naira was being spent on transportation by visitors to the destination.
The number of visitors into the destination for the 2024 Calabar festival outweighed that of 2023 by 42 per cent. A total number of 62,512 visitors were estimated to have visited the destination for the 2023 Calabar festivals and Carnival, spending about N3.1billion on transportation to the destination.
Most of the visitors were from Akwa Ibom State, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Abia, FCT, Enugu, Cameroon, UK, Canada, Equatorial Guinea. Calabar recorded over 300,000 tourists within the period of (1st November 2024 – December 31st, 2024) who came in for site seeing of the OMR, Marina Resort and the Kwa falls.
Most of the tourist were from Abuja the FCT, Lagos State and neighbouring Akwa Ibom State. Again, there was a tremendous increase in tourist to the destination when compared to the 2023 figures of over 190,345 tourists to our enchanted attraction sites.
Throughout the period under review, November – December, 2024 the occupancy rate of accommodation establishments in Calabar rose to 68 per cent from 57 per cent in 2023. More than 90 per cent of hotels in Calabar had a 100 per cent occupancy rate between December 15th – December 29th, 2024. Revenue generated from hotel bookings is estimated at N2.79 billion ($1.74 million) with 25k per night confirmed hotel bookings in December alone for about 3,600 available bed spaces in Calabar Cluster. Revenue from food and breakfast alone stood at an estimated N900 million ($562,000).
