When Pam Seidl and Abe Weber look at the numbers, their stomachs sink.
As Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau executive director and Appleton International Airport director respectively, they follow hotel occupancy and flight numbers, important indicators of the health of the local economy.
Both charts look like ski jumps with soaring numbers that plummeted when the pandemic took hold this spring.
“Our visitor spending was $511 million in 2019. It was a record-setting year. A great year. That’s why this is so disheartening,” said Seidl. “We expect 2020 will be about half of 2019, based on how room tax is trending.”
Soccer tournaments and conventions disappeared. Concerts and theater productions never took place. The usual EAA and Green Bay Packers overflow hotel bookings here vanished. The Mile of Music festival was silenced this week.
Businesses that count on event-goer dollars include hotels, restaurants, bars, stores and entertainment venues.
Likewise, at the airport, “We started out 2020 like the greatest year ever. January, February and the first part of March were up over 35 percent,” said Weber. “COVID came in and knocked us off our seats. We were down 95 percent by the end of March.”
He’s optimistic the airport will end 2020 just 40% down.
“Many carriers, when they came through COVID, were smaller and will take time to grow back to where they were,” he said.
While leisure travelers are slowly coming back, “We won’t be at a full recovery until our business traffic comes back.”
The snapshot Seidl and Weber gave of travel and hospitality numbers echoed the plunging second quarter drop in GDP, a broader measure of goods and services, reported Thursday by the Commerce Department. The historic 9.5% drop showed consumers and businesses dramatically cut back spending and production during the early months of the pandemic.
Hotel occupancy began inching higher here in June and July. Youth sports started to trickle back.
But it might be 2024 before numbers return to healthy 2019 levels, Seidl said. “It’s going to be a rough couple of years.”
One positive, she said, is that half of the canceled events were just postponed and will be rebooked. A few, unfortunately, won’t contribute dollars to the local economy for a very long time.
“Some events book in a three-to-four year window,” she said. “One that canceled for 2021 said, ‘We’ll see you in 2025.’”
Contact reporter Maureen Wallenfang at 920-993-7116 or mwallenfang@postcrescent.com. Follow her on Twitter at @wallenfang.
More: The Buzz: Green Gecko grocery store returns Saturday to downtown Appleton
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