Royal Street, New Orleans. The city’s recovery following Hurricane Katrina has been led by tourism.

Tourism in New Orleans - the birthplace of jazz - is starting to swing like it did before Hurricane Katrina silenced the Louisiana city five years ago.

Since then, the tourism sector has led the city’s economic recovery, said economic development officials in a Deseret News report.

New Orleans' long-term goal is to have a diversified economy, but the city is not there yet, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, Stephen Perry said.

"In the short term and in the mid-term, it was clear the culture and tourist industries would be the big difference in getting back on our feet.

"It not only put a lot of middle class people in the city back to work, it had a tremendous impact on the tax revenue."

Mr Perry estimated that tourism had regained about 82 per cent of its pre-Katrina momentum, when it was a US$5 billion industry. The industry contributes close to 30 per cent of the city’s operating budget through hotel occupancy taxes and sales taxes.

New Orleans received 7.5 million visitors in 2009, compared to a typical pre-storm year of 8.5 million, according to Mr Perry's agency. This translated to hotel occupancy for January through May being up 13.1 per cent from last year, according to Jan Freitag of Smith Travel Research.

The biggest challenge for the city is overcoming negative perceptions that have been perpetuated by videos of the 2005 flooding and the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"People thought we were still flooded long after the hurricane, long after the flood waters were gone," Perry said.

"We were having the best six months we have had since Katrina, and then the oil spill came along … and now we're battling an image problem again."