WARSAW, Sept. 2 (Xinhua) -- Pageant contestants from around the globe have gathered in Warsaw for the Miss World 2006 contest, organizers said on Saturday.

The beauty queens arrived in the Polish capital on Friday for a month of pageantry across the country ahead of the final of the Miss World 2006 pageant contest scheduled for Sept. 30.

The highlights of the month-long tour will be the final, which will be staged at the Congress Hall of the Science and Culture Palace in Warsaw.

When Eric Morley founded Miss World in 1951, he might not have imagined that the pageant would one day attract a global audience of more than 2 billion.

The audience rating for the Miss World final is now the third highest, next only to the Olympic Games and the World Cup football matches.

On Sept. 30, nearly 200 TV stations around the world will give live broadcasts of the pageant final. Polish authorities hope the event would help boost the county's tourism image overseas.

A total of 30 million zlotys (9.68 million U.S. dollars) will be spent on preparations for the final, but the profits from the contest are expected to be much higher.

TVP, the Polish TV station that has been awarded the right to broadcast live the final, will be among the main beneficiaries, with its advertising income alone expected to reach 15 million zlotys (4.84 million U.S. dollars).

The audience will vote through the audio communication system or short message service and the telecommunication operators are expected to harvest about 32 million zlotys (10.32 million U.S. dollars).

Meanwhile, hoteliers, restaurateurs and operators of public transport also hope to earn an additional 44 million zlotys (14.19 million U.S. dollars), the Market Economy Institute of Poland estimated.

The contestants will travel around the cities and the famous lakes and landmarks in Poland through September and activities of various kinds are scheduled along their itinerary, including the mini-finals for Miss World.

The Contest for Miss Talent will be held in Wroclaw in southwestern Poland, while the Contest for Miss Beach has been tentatively planned to be held in the tricity -- a joint name for Gdansk, Sopot and Gdynia in the north. Miss Sports will be held inthe northeastern city of Gizycko.

Cities to host these events are going all the way to present their local tourism resources. For instance, Gizycko will entertain the contestants with sailing in yacht, sightseeing flights in balloons, as well as a party in the 19-century castle Boyen.

"Many foreigners don't even know the existence of a country called Poland. They often confuse Poland with Holland or Finland,"the vice-chairman of the Poland tourism organization, Stanislaw Wojtera, told reporters.

"What we are striving for is, when the billions of people around the world watch the Miss World final or read reports about the preparations for it, they will at least see a European map with an arrow pointed to the location of Poland." he said.

Miss Iceland Unnur Birna Vilhjalmsdottir, who was crowned Miss World last December in the Chinese city of Sanya, said: "Few people know the charm of Poland. I myself had no idea of it until I came to Poland earlier this year for the first time. Now I visitPoland regularly. I am in love with her."

Most Poles respond favorably to the contest. A poll conducted by the National Public Opinion Center showed 87 percent of the respondents believed the 2006 Miss World final is good for the country's fame and is a "good advertisement" for expanding its influence, while 83 percent of the interviewees said the contest will help draw foreign tourists to the country.

According to the Market Economy Institute, the contest will help bring in as many as 5 million tourists in the next four years,who will spend around 1 billion U.S. dollars in Poland.

Meanwhile, the booming tourism will create 20,000 new jobs and the GDP is expected to rise by one percentage point. Enditem