BRADENTON – Research Data Services’ (RDS) Ann Wittine presented an optimistic state of tourism update to the Manatee County Tourist Development Council (TDC) on April 24.
According to the latest available tourism statistics from February, total visitors and economic impact were up over February 2022, with 88,900 visitors (up 1.6%). Room nights were slightly down, with 218,900 room nights (down 1.1%) and $214,439,600 in economic impact was up 5.4%.
“Some of these numbers don’t seem that impressive on the surface, but this is February, so we were pretty near capacity,” Wittine said. “There just isn’t room for those big growth numbers we’ve been seeing. This is also during a month when some property owners told us they were impacted by red tide.”
Room occupancy for February was down slightly (-3.5%) after being up less than 1% in the December 2022 report from RDS. The average daily room rate, however, is up more than 10%, at $265.02 per day in February 2023 compared to $240.51 in February 2022.
RDS also keeps track of where visitors are coming from. The biggest increase in visitor origin domestically is the Northeast, which is up 10% over the same time period in 2022. Wittine attributes this growth to additional non-stop flights being added from that region. Globally, travel from Europe is up 73.2% and Canada is up 153.7% over February 2022. The largest decrease was from the Midwest, which was down 9.5%, followed by the Southeast, down 3.5% and Florida, down 2.2%.
“We had a slight increase in number of visitors, which is why room nights are slightly down,” Wittine said. “At the same time, we have a slight increase in length of stay. We are at 7.7 nights average this year compared to 7.6 last year, but more importantly, we are up from 7.2 in 2019 pre-COVID, which is a huge increase.”
RDS’s fiscal year to date (October through February) numbers are up significantly, echoing the double digit increase in February economic impact. At 437,900, total visitors are up 6.4% and at $743,677,600, economic impact is up 11.8% from the same period a year ago. Wittine has said many times that a great deal of the large increases in visitors and economic impact since pre-COVID 2019 are directly related to Sarasota Bradenton International Airport (SRQ) adding dozens of new direct flights from all regions of the country. Keeping with the constant growth reported, SRQ is once again up 16.3% from March of 2022 with 1.29 million people traveling through the airport in just the first three months of 2023, which is more than the entire year of 2020 and only slightly less than the entire pre-COVID year of 2019.
Wittine says she forecasts a summer where the numbers go down slightly. RDS does extensive surveys with people who have shown interest in visiting Manatee County, many of whom will be coming to Anna Maria Island, and the consulting company is beginning to see a trend of people concerned about rising prices for travel to the area.
Wittine says there’s no way to exactly predict what the coming months will bring, but she shared some comments from the vendors surveyed, which point to good things to come: “Bookings are up;” “A lot more last-minute, shorter reservations than normal;” “Looking good for summer;” “March was beautiful, more than expected;” and “April reservations are strong.”
