Tourism rebounding in Manatee County

MANATEE COUNTY – Tourist Development Council members received some encouraging news just before Christmas.

During this morning’s meeting, held at the Bradenton Area Convention Center, representatives from Visit Florida and Research Data Services gave TDC members updates, and the news was good – tourism numbers are going up despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Jen Carlisle with Visit Florida said that while the numbers they’re seeing are an overall 37% decrease in tourism from the same time last year and a 57% decrease in tourism from Canada, travel increased in the second and third quarters of the year by 71%. Carlisle attributed the increase in numbers to the Visit Florida-led marketing efforts.

Beginning in September, she said the organization targeted Florida residents, urging them through marketing to take a trip in their own state. In October, the target area of that effort increased to include drivable markets within a 700-mile radius, such as Atlanta, Charlotte and Nashville.

From these rebound advertising campaigns, Carlisle said that Visit Florida has had 300 million impressions and that 70% of people who saw the marketing spots were more likely to visit the state than they were beforehand. And while international travel is still largely on hold due to travel restrictions, she said that Visit Florida is still marketing in other countries to keep the destination at the forefront of potential visitors’ minds when restrictions are lifted. Elliott Falcione, director of the Bradenton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, said that his organization also is making sure that they continue marketing in other countries, particularly in Europe and Canada, to make sure that the Bradenton area is on visitors’ minds when they’re ready to book future travel plans.

Speaking on behalf of the central European market from Germany via Zoom, Dorothea Hohn said that her research has found that people are ready to travel to the United States again, particularly to beach and outdoor destinations like the Bradenton and Gulf Islands area, however, she added that those visitors are pinning their plans on the availability of a COVID-19 vaccine and the lifting of international travel bans and restrictions.

Anne Wittine of Tampa-based Research Data Services, the county’s tourism consultant, gave a presentation on the current state of tourism in the area, noting that the number of visitors is down only 10.3% for the year so far from 2019. The economic impact of tourism, – the amount of money put into the local economy by tourists – is down 13.2% from the previous year. And while occupancy is down 14.3% from the previous year, Wittine said that may largely be due to a lack of reporting from privately-managed vacation rental properties. She said that the majority of the occupancy numbers received come from hotels, motels and professionally-managed vacation rental units, and that it’s hard to get numbers from individual vacation rental owners or those rented through services such as Airbnb.

Some of the challenges facing the local tourism industry, Wittine said, are that visitors are waiting until the last minute, often one to seven days out from their expected travel time, to book vacations and that visitation from Canada and Europe, where travel restrictions are in place, is too small to count at this time. Another issue is that cancellations of trips are going up as the number of locally-reported COVID-19 cases increases.

And while the number of people feeling more confident and safe about traveling is steadily increasing, Wittine said one key element for the local tourism businesses is to provide good information on what is open and what kind of experience travelers can expect when they arrive at their destination, information that is often difficult to come by online.