NEW YORK — Four years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks crippled the city's travel and tourism industry, visitors once again love New York.

The Big Apple is completing a record summer, with hotels fuller and pricier than ever. Business travelers are back doing their deals, and tourists are visiting in record numbers, motivated partly by a sense of patriotic duty. The boom shows no sign of letting up.

"New York rebounded the fastest of any (city) in the country," Peter Yesawich, CEO of travel marketing firm Yesawich Pepperdine Brown & Russell, says of the nationwide travel slump after 9/11.

Harder hit in the attacks than Washington, D.C., New York has stormed back for a combination of reasons. Big events on a scale that create a worldwide buzz are part of it: artist Christo's orange drapes installation this year in Central Park, the 2004 Republican National Convention and the new Tribeca Film Festival, for example. Also, the city previously known for its legendary hard edge showed an appealing human side as it struggled back, inducing millions to see it in person.

And credit city leadership. Having no model to work from, the city quickly crafted a strategy that leveraged Madison Avenue marketing savvy, its big-name residents and millions in government money.

This year, New York-area airports expect to handle about 100 million inbound passengers, a record. In July, the average price for a hotel room in Manhattan shot up to $212 a night, a 15 percent jump from a year earlier. And that's for those lucky enough to find a room, as occupancy in the city's hotels rose to a record 87 percent in July, according to PKF Consulting.

"The city would end up getting sold out before 9/11, but not at the frequency or amount of the demand that we're seeing today," says Scott Wiseman of hotel chain Accor, which has an upscale Sofitel and lower-priced Red Roof Inn in Manhattan.

Retired teacher Joel Glazier of Wilmington, Del., was so shocked at the crowds in June that he decided to postpone a return trip until fall, in hopes of "more elbow room."

"It was hard to believe how crowded the city was" Glazier says. He's visited New York several times, including to see the Christo project in February and, most recently, to watch Ringo Starr play in Bryant Park for a "Good Morning America" broadcast.

And New York can thank sympathetic out-of-towners like Christine Scott and her husband, John Llewellyn, of Knoxville, Tenn., who kept plans two weeks after 9/11 to fly to New York and stay at the Waldorf-Astoria. Now, they return three or four times a year, mostly for vacations. "We never considered not going," she says of the first post-9/11 visit. "We were just determined not to change our plans" because of the terrorism.

Such a rebound seemed unthinkable in the dark days after the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Except for the army of relief workers who streamed into the city, and a few intrepid tourists such as Scott and Llewellyn, travel to New York almost stopped. Airliners arrived nearly empty. Hotels could barely give away rooms. Restaurants, theaters and museums saw patronage plummet.

"It was the common thought that New York was doomed," says public relations czar Howard Rubenstein, who worked with the city's convention and visitors bureau, NYC & Co., to handle crisis communications.

Washington, D.C., has also made a strong comeback since terrorists flew a jet into the Pentagon on 9/11. Afterward, hotels were running about 30 percent full, but in June, Washington's hotels were 82 percent full, the city's visitors and convention bureau says, and bargain rates have dried up.

Still, the threat of terror lingers on many tourists' minds.

Braving rain to explore Rockefeller Center last week, Kim and David Cumming, of Dallas, both said they worried about terrorism as they flew into town.

Despite a boost from a weak dollar in recent years, foreign tourism hasn't returned to pre-9/11 levels, partly because of the U.S. government's tighter screen on visitors from abroad. But foreign tourism — particularly important because international visitors spend more on average — appears to be increasing.