BC credit card sales up 93% during Olympics

Stats for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics are mind-boggling, what with medal counts, visitor counts, etc. as people from every corner of the globe played and cheered for 17 days. But we have one more for you – and we think this one tops all the rest – by a long shot!

The figures from Visa are in and here’s what they show.

International Visa cardholder spending in British Columbia during the Olympics was over US$115 million! That’s an average of US$6.8 million and 65,000 international Visa debit, credit and prepaid transactions per day for 17 days!

Let’s take a closer look at some more astounding figures. It gets better:

• A 93% increase over the same 17-day period a year ago in British Columbia.

• Total number of transactions on internationally issued Visa cards during the Games was 1.1 million. 85% more than the same period last year in BC

• 92% of the transactions were for accommodation, travel, restaurant, entertainment and retail sales

Do you remember when credit cards were in their infancy and the retailer had to dial a number, repeat the card number over the phone and wait for some nameless, faceless person on the other end to confirm the transaction? We know that this is no longer the case but just how did Visa handle the 65,000 transactions per day during the Olympics? Well Visa has one of the world’s most advanced processing networks, called VisaNet and this amazing system is capable of handling more than 10,000 transactions per second! Piece of cake!

Here’s a look at how much each country spent in Vancouver and around the province during the Olympics – only the ones that spent over US$1 million, though:

• USA – $61.1 m
• China – $7.8 m
• United Kingdom – $5.1 m
• Russian Federation – $4.3 m
• Australia – $3.7 m
• Japan – $3.6 m
• South Korea – $3.6 m
• Hong Kong, China – $2.8 m
• Norway – $2.4 m
• Germany – $2.1 m
• Switzerland – $2.0 m
• Brazil – $1.6 m
• France – $1.4 m
• Sweden – $1.2 m

So much for global recession!