MANATEE COUNTY – Research Data Services’ Ann Wittine presented her state of tourism update to the county Tourist Development Council (TDC) on Jan. 22, comparing tourism in November 2023 to the same month in 2022.
Total visitors were down by 6.4%, room nights were down by 7.5% and economic impact was down by 6.9%, said Wittine, the county’s tourism consultant, citing the latest available statistics. The average daily room rate was down 2.3%, at $186.63 per day in November 2023 compared to $191.11 in November 2022.
“This was the Hurricane Ian effect,” Wittine said. “Last year, we were hosting recovery workers, insurance adjusters, displaced residents and people who would have vacationed in other places but couldn’t because of other places being more impacted by the storm.”
Wittine was quick to point out that although last November’s numbers were down, the number of visitors (80,700) was up 45.1% from pre-COVID 2019 during the same period.
She said that although many of the numbers were down from the previous year, such as economic impact falling from slightly over $114 million in November 2022 to $106.3 million in November 2023, the goal of the Bradenton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau is not necessarily to get more people to visit but rather see that those who do visit make a greater impact on the local economy. She said this strategy is working, as the pre-COVID 2019 economic impact for the same period was only $67.4 million, which makes November 2023 up 76.3%, a number the CVB is excited about.
Research Data Services also keeps track of where visitors are coming from when they visit the area. The largest increase in any visitor origin is Canada, which is up 51.8% over the same period in 2022. Travel from Europe rose by 1.3%. The largest domestic visitor origin outside of Florida was the Midwest, which saw 18,240 visitors in November 2023, down 1.3% from November 2022. Wittine credits the marketing efforts of the CVB in Florida for making visitors from within the state the largest of all measured regions.
“All of the marketing we did post-COVID to our immediate surrounding Florida markets has continued to have a ripple effect,” Wittine said. “This shows that if we can get a visitor from Florida here, they come back again. With that marketing, we brought a lot of people in that hadn’t yet discovered what they have in their own backyard.”
