$600m spent by tourists to southern Alberta in 2014

LETHBRIDGE — Visitors to southern Alberta spent more than $600 million in 2014.

Those are the newest numbers available from Travel Alberta, based on surveys done by Statistics Canada. They show about a third of those dollars were spent by people driving themselves around the south tourism region, and another third on food and beverages.

The biggest reason people came was to visit friends and family, and they were the biggest source of accomodations.

Altogether, the south tourism region accounted for 12 percent of all tourist visits in the province.