It's not too late to score tickets for NCAA football's national championship game in New Orleans January 9.

For sports fans, the holiday season offers a final few golden weeks of NCAA football, as college teams play in bowl games that determine the national champion and set the final standings for the season. If you’ve enjoyed the games from your couch in the past, it’s not too late to look into actually scoring tickets.

They are not all high-stakes match-ups, but bowl games offer a chance to experience the American tradition of college football in an unusual setting. Most are in warm-weather locales, and some take place in iconic stadiums, like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, and the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans.

Whether you want to follow your alma mater to a Florida bowl game or find a game in your home region, here are some ways to look for tickets:

Stubhub.com is a website for buying and selling tickets to all kinds of events. It currently has tickets to every bowl game and stadium seating charts.

Search the Craigslist site for the city where the game will be held and the home cities of the two teams playing (sports tickets on Craigslist Orlando).

Scour the online fan forums for the participating teams for people looking to get rid of extra tickets. If you can’t find a forum via search engine, the school’s athletic department site or the local newspaper sports page is usually a good place to start.

If you are willing to shell out some cash for the best tickets or VIP treatment, look to sports-travel providers like Premiere Global Sports.

Between Christmas Eve and January 9, 2012, 29 bowl games will be played. Here are a few of them:

Hottest ticket: The BCS National Championship in New Orleans January 9, pits Louisiana State against Alabama. Stubhub prices start at $1,050.

Most unusual location: The Pinstripe Bowl in the Bronx, New York, Rutgers vs. Iowa State, brings college football to Yankee Stadium, December 30. Stubhub prices start at $39.

Traditional titans at a bargain: The Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando features two historically strong football programs, both having mediocre seasons. Notre Dame plays Florida State on December 29. Stubhub prices start at $50.

Sneak peek at a top draft pick: Stanford is the underdog when it plays Oklahoma State in the Fiesta Bowl (Glendale, Arizona) January 2, but its quarterback Andrew Luck is likely to be the top pick in the 2012 NFL Draft.

Photo: BCSfootball.org/ESPN

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With a record 51.455 million visitors in 2010, Orlando, Florida, beat New York City fair and square in the race to become the first U.S. destination to breach the 50 million visitor barrier. Orlando’s 2010 tally was a huge 10.5 percent improvement over its 2009 total of 46.6 million visitors.

Visit Orlando - 50 million visitors

The announcement was made simultaneously at separate events by Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer in Orlando and Visit Orlando President and CEO Gary Sain in San Francisco. Sain credits Visit Orlando’s marketing campaigns for the huge bounce.

“Visit Orlando launched aggressive global marketing campaigns showcasing that Orlando offers visitors something they can’t get anywhere else—world famous attractions, value for their money and an experience they will never forget,” said Gary Sain, speaking at the International Pow Wow conference in San Francisco. “The fact that Orlando bounced back in 2010 with the most visitation in not only Orlando’s history, but the most of any U.S. destination, shows our aggressive leisure and meetings strategies worked, and our message resonated with travelers.”

George Fertitta, chief executive of NYC & Company, the official marketing organization for New York, was also at Pow Wow, for the launch of “Get More NYC: Lower Manhattan”—a global campaign to promote Lower Manhattan to visitors and travel media.

This campaign is a prelude to the Sept. 12, 2011 opening of the 9/11 Memorial, which is expected to provide a huge boost to New York tourism as millions of people visit Ground Zero.

Fertitta pointed out that Orlando includes outlying counties in its total and that New York’s international base is much bigger than what Orlando has. Orlando is indeed relatively more dependent on domestic visitors as compared to destinations like New York.

Orlando visitation chart; Source: D.K. Shifflet

Of the 51.455 million visitors who came to Orlando last year, domestic visitors accounted for 47.8 million, or 93 percent of the total. In comparison, New York City welcomed 48.7 visitors in 2010, with 9.7 million, or  20 percent, coming from foreign countries. New York is on track to breach the 50 million barrier in 2012.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that Orlando is officially the first U.S. destination to reach 50 million visitors. That’s a big deal and cause enough for Orlando’s travel industry to enjoy its own marketing campaign tagline: “Orlando Makes Me Smile.”

Photo credit: DavidAllenStudio.com (courtesy Visit Orlando)

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An epic battle with an all British cast (HP vs BP) is about to begin on June 18, 2010. Can the immense buzz and rush of visitors to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park at Universal Orlando rescue Florida tourism from the clutches of the BP oil spill?

Forbidden Journey - Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Universal Orlando

But Harry Potter is not alone in the battle to save Florida, because the Gulf Coast is about to get a huge boost from a federal aid package to be announced this week. Before we get to that, a little bit more about Harry Potter. The 7 Harry Potter books have sold 400 million copies, and the six movies have hauled in $5.4 billion, with one more (in 2 parts) to come.

Cost of WWHP theme park - $265 million base cost. Include additional enhancements to other sections, and the cost goes up to $380 million. Factor in the ad blitz ($3m Superbowl ad alone) and other marketing costs, and the final cost is within range of half a billion dollars.

Forecast - The biggest boost is expected to come from the UK, which was supplanted by Canada last year as Orlando’s top international market. Before the Potter Effect became apparent, the Orlando/Orange County CVB had a forecast of 817,000 visitors from the UK for 2010. The CVB now says it is seeing trends of WWHP pushing up the tourism numbers.

The end of the recession, the rave reviews of the Park and its interactive shopping experiences, the perfect summer launch, and the upcoming November release of Part 1 of the last Potter movie all point towards a blockbuster opening year for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

The biggest indicator that the Potter wave is going to be huge comes from the fact that Universal’s competitors – WDW and Seaworld, are gearing up for an influx of thousands of Potter fans who don’t usually visit Orlando. It wouldn’t be too far off-base to expect the number of UK visitors Orlando gets to climb up to between 850,000 and 875,000 this year and head towards the 2008 level (959,000) by 2011.

BP oilspill impact on Florida - Sean Snaith, director of UCF’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness, has come up with a study which shows that Florida stands to lose 195,000 jobs and $10.9 billion in revenue due to the oil spill.

The figures are based on a scenario where Florida’s Gulf Coast tourism tanks by 50%. If you take a very optimistic view of the oilspill impact and assume only a 10% dip in tourism, Florida still loses 39,000 jobs and $2.2 billion in tourism revenue.

Gulf Coast Bailout - BP has already paid out $70 million to the Gulf Coast states for tourism promotion alone, with $25m going to Florida. But how many tourists and how much revenue $25m worth of tourism promotion brings back remains an open question.

What will help, though, is the Obama Administration’s impending announcement of federal aid in the form of a Gulf Coast recovery package, and their insistence that BP establish an escrow account with a huge reserve to settle claims. This is cold hard cash that will help tourism providers survive until the oil spill is cleaned up and the tourists come back.

Taken together, Harry Potter, the federal bailout and BP compensation claims will more than adequately fill the gaping hole in VisitFlorida’s annual numbers.

There are around 6 million good reasons why the Shamu show will never end at Sea World Orlando, inspite of the tragic ‘killing’ of trainer Dawn Brancheau on Feb 24, 2010 by Tilikum aka Tilly – a 30 year old 12,300 pound bull Orca.

Believe, Seaworld Orlando

The coverage of the incident has mostly focused on who was at fault in the specific incident – whether Tilly had gone rogue, or it was the trainer’s fault.

But the fact that it happened at the end of the show has a lot of significance. Flashback to 1987, and there’s a lesson that Sea World seems to have forgotten.

On Nov 21, 1987 at Sea World San Diego, a trainer got squashed by an Orca named Orky. It led to a wave of lawsuits, investigations and public protests, which eventually unearthed that the orcas had inflicted a series of injuries on trainers in the period leading up to the Nov 21 incident.

To be specific - 14 injuries in a 4 month period from Aug-Nov 1987, with trainers being rammed, bitten and dragged. It also came to light that Orky was forced to perform inspite of being partially blind and in bad health.

Sea World made a mea culpa, promised a review and new safety measures. Meanwhile the show went on, but the trainers were temporarily not allowed into the water with the orcas.

Fast-forward to Saturday, Feb 27, 2010, with Sea World announcing that the show begins today after a brief 3-day hiatus. Pending a review of the Feb 24 incident, the trainers won’t be allowed into the water. In a press conference, SeaWorld CEO Jim Atchison said “we will make improvements and changes and move forward.”

Some of the Orcas have been doing 8 shows a day, 365 days a year. Orcas are intelligent creatures, and there’s a daily and on-going struggle for control between them and the trainers, to show who is in charge – it plays out in the form of rewards, food, isolation, disobidience, etc. Added to that is the frustration of being caged and not being able to develop the familial support structure and communication that orcas need and develop in pods in the wild.

Jason Hribal, author of Fear of the Animal Planet, reveals how the Orcas have learnt that the end is the most critical part of the show, and an Orca with a gripe will plan a disruption and simply stop performing or protest in some way just before the end. Sea World has routines in place to deal with this – they switch whales and engage the audience with lectures and videos.

This is where Dawn Brancheau’s death and Tilly’s attempt to ‘punish’ her draw parallels with the 1987 orca rebellion. Tilly did what he did was because he had something new to gripe about – other than being caged for 28 years, forced to perform shows, and used as a guinea pig for helping Sea World develop its artificial insemination process. It also means that there will likely have been more such incidents in the past few months involving Tilly and other orcas.

This brings us to the question of why Sea World is still doing something which is wrong on so many levels. The rewards are plain enough – around 6 million annual visitors (2008 figures) to Sea World Orlando alone, with the Shamu shows as the center-piece. Private equity firm Blackstone purchased Busch Entertainment (which owns the Sea World parks) for $2.3 billion last year.

Sea World’s Orcanomy has grown so huge that they now own 25 of the 42 orcas in captivity. Since it is illegal to capture or import orcas from the wild, they have refined artificial insemination techniques which make it possible for them to refresh the stock via breeding (Tilly has sired 13 offspring).

End game – Dawn Brancheau’s death was not an accident, Tilly is not a killer and maybe has some health issues. The show will not end, and Sea World will go the extra mile to keep the orcas happy for now. But this will happen again. What the orcas really need is a labor rep and a retirement plan, since OSHA doesn’t seem able or willing to help them.