New York City to reluctant tourists: please come back

As New York City fully reopens, tourism officials are hoping to revive a critical driver of its economy by making an urgent plea for visitors to start rushing back.

Armed with $30 million in federal aid, the city’s tourism promotion agency, NYC & Company, is developing an aggressive campaign to overcome New York’s image as the original US epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic. They hope to lure 10 million visitors to the city for overnight stays or day trips between Memorial Day and Labour Day.

With most international travel still closed off, the vast majority of those visitors will be domestic vacationers, not higher-spending foreign tourists. But after the pandemic virtually wiped out the city’s tourism industry and forced many of its big hotels to shut their doors, any and all visitors are welcome.

“What we realised is that we need to create an urgency to visit now,” NYC & Company CEO Fred Dixon said. Dixon said the agency’s surveys of residents of the Northeast showed that people “were very keen and eager to return to the city, but they were looking for the sign that it is the right time.”

That sign will come in the form of the city’s biggest advertising campaign in decades, including national TV ads with the theme “It’s time for New York City.” Still in production but scheduled to start appearing in two weeks, those ads will be aimed at persuading Americans who might otherwise have gone to Europe or elsewhere overseas to consider spending some time — and money — in New York instead.

The first video ad cuts quickly through scenes of unmasked New Yorkers at play, from the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx to the beach in the Rockaways, and asks, “Where were you summer ’21?”

“The summer of NYC is here, and now it’s time to tell the whole world about how this city is building a recovery for all of us,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “Tourism impacts hundreds of thousands of jobs across the five boroughs, and its return will fuel our recovery even more.”

The agency’s efforts to attract tourists had been increasingly successful through 2019, when the city recorded an all-time high of 66 million visitors. At its peak, the tourism industry employed more than 280,000 workers — about 1 of every 14 jobs in the city — according to the state comptroller’s office.

NYC & Company counts anyone who travels from more than 50 miles away as a visitor, but it places a higher value on overnight guests. Most valued of all are visitors from overseas because they tend to stay longer and spend more money at hotels, restaurants, stores and attractions.

But almost all of the city’s biggest foreign sources of visitors, including China and Brazil, are still prohibiting trips to the United States. This year, Mexico has been the leading source of international tourists, Dixon said. He said he hopes that Canada and the United Kingdom start allowing their citizens to resume travelling freely to the United States soon, and that once that happens, the agency will start broadcasting its ads there.

The delayed restart of most international travel caused NYC & Company to revise its projection for visitors this year down slightly, to 36.1 million from a previous estimate of 36.4 million, Dixon said.

But he said the agency predicts visitors will rise to 58.9 million in 2022 and surpass 65 million again in 2023, due in part to pent-up demand. The elimination of many pandemic rules, the plunge in infection rates and the high rate of vaccinations are all expected to lead to more tourists.

As part of its campaign, NYC & Company is also teaming with AAA to pitch the city as a road-trip destination and preparing a sweepstakes to give away trips to the city, Dixon said.

The effort was made possible by an allocation of pandemic aid that the city received from the American Rescue Plan, which Congress passed in March. That money supplemented the agency’s budget, which is funded by the city and dues paid by hotels and other businesses that are members.

Still, the outlook for the city’s hotel industry, which depends on extended visits and business travelers, is not as rosy, according to Alison Hoyt, senior director of consulting for STR, a research firm. Hoyt said STR’s forecast does not project New York’s hotel industry to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels even by the end of 2025.

The hotel business in New York is rebounding slower than in many other places, especially Sunbelt cities such as Miami and Tampa, Florida, where hotel occupancy rates have surpassed pre-pandemic levels, she said.

While many hotels in New York have reopened in the past few months and they are filling more of their rooms each week, as a group they are still losing money, she said. That is because the average room rate they are charging, about $185 a night in mid-June, is below their average operating cost.

In the week that ended June 12, the occupancy rate of the 700,000 available hotel rooms in New York was about 62%, down from 88% in the comparable week of 2019, Hoyt said. There were 82 hotels with about 25,000 rooms that had yet to reopen, she said.

Some prominent hotels, including the 1,900-room Hilton near Rockefeller Center, have remained closed for more than a year.

Still, some hotel industry executives expressed optimism about the recovery of tourism in the city and how their business will fare.

“We have had a much slower build-back than some of the other markets down in the South,” said Dan Nadeau, area general manager for Marriott in New York. But, he added, “the progression that we’ve seen has been real and sustained. We feel very good about how New York is coming along.”

All but one of the 36 Marriotts in Midtown Manhattan are open and have been booking rooms at about 70% of their pre-pandemic pace, Nadeau said. He said that represented a sharp increase since the end of March and that he expected demand to remain high through the summer.

The scheduled reopening of most Broadway theatres in September, he said, should provide an additional boost.

“Everything tells me that the reopening of Broadway is going to be a shot in the arm to New York that’s really going to help,” he said.

The sooner tourists return, the sooner thousands of hotel employees will get their jobs back. Hotels have been gradually recalling workers who have been furloughed for more than a year.

“There’s no question that the market is recovering, but it’s recovering slowly,” said Richard Maroko, president of the Hotel Trades Council, a union that represents about 30,000 hotel workers in the city.

Maroko said the pandemic had been “devastating” to the industry and his union’s members, but now they have reason to hope.

“They are waiting for the tourists to come back so that they can return to work,” he said.

© 2021 New York Times News Service