Florida’s vital tourism industry suffered an estimated 60.5 percent drop in visitors as the covid-19 pandemic hit hard during the year’s second quarter, with international travel off more than 90 percent.
And the outlook remains dim for the state following the nearly 20 million visitor drop from April through June. The tourism industry must combat ongoing negative perceptions of Florida’s handling of covid-19, international travel bans, people slow to return to entertainment venues and double-digit unemployment.
During the second quarter, an estimated 12.801 million people — almost all traveling from other states — came to Florida as businesses were shut down in April and amid harried reopening efforts in May and June, according to numbers posted Sunday by the Visit Florida tourism-marketing agency.
In 2019, Florida recorded 32.4 million visitors in the second quarter and 68.2 million for the first six months. For the first half of 2020, the state saw its tourism numbers drop 35.2 percent, attracting 44.188 million visitors.
Florida saw a 12.3 decrease in first-quarter tourism from 2019, representing a reduction of 4.4 million visitors, as the pandemic started to take hold. In all, an estimated 31.39 million visitors came to the state during the first quarter.
Florida ended 2019 with 131.4 million visitors.
Among the second-quarter 2020 numbers, Florida saw just 235,000 overseas visitors and 9,000 Canadians, per the numbers posted by Visit Florida.
The state, which had been on a nine-year run of increasing tourist numbers, estimated nearly 2.65 million overseas visitors in the second quarter of 2019 and 931,000 Canadians in the same time.
After releasing the second-quarter numbers Sunday, Visit Florida added a note online that the pandemic has impacted the way the numbers were estimated and that the international figures released may be higher than the actual totals.
“Please note that due to the unprecedented nature of the covid-19 pandemic and the impact it has had on data used to produce visitor estimates, the numbers provided … are likely to face larger-than-normal revisions as new data become available,” Visit Florida said in the note.
“Also note that for Q2 2020, VISIT FLORIDA believes that the number of overseas visitors to the state was actually 20,000-30,000, but the officially published estimate was calculated using the standard methodology per request from the principals of the Revenue Estimating Conference,” the agency note said, referring to a state panel that analyzes economic data and revenues.
With Florida continuing to add thousands of coronavirus cases a day, a sharp rebound in the tourism industry isn’t expected soon.
Visit Florida has set aside $13 million to market toward a tourism rebound. The initial emphasis will be to get Floridians to explore other parts of the state and to attract people in nearby states.
While Florida has been working to reopen the economy since May 4, an increase of covid-19 cases and deaths starting in late June has slowed the effort, amid continued negative news about the state and bars and breweries prohibited from on-site sales of alcohol.
Last week, Walt Disney World posted on its website plans to cut back hours starting Sept. 8 as the Florida theme parks have reported more cancellations than anticipated since reopening in the first half of July.
As July came to an end, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine went on the NBC show “Meet the Press” and warned that his state was at a crucial stage with covid-19 cases rising and “could become Florida.” Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf followed with his own statement that “We don’t want to become Florida.”
At the same time, Toronto Blue Jays President Mark Shapiro spoke against moving baseball games to the team’s spring training facility in Dunedin because of player health concerns. Canada’s international travel restrictions regarding the U.S. required the team to find a home ballpark in the U.S. The team settled on Buffalo, N.Y.
On Aug. 5, Christopher Thompson, president and CEO of Brand USA, warned members of the Economic Club of Florida that international tourist spending in the United States might not return to pre-coronavirus levels until 2024.
Thompson, appearing at the Governors Club in Tallahassee, said that even with a vaccine for the coronavirus, consumers will need to be confident about their health while traveling and while at the destinations.
“Today’s environment is the worst we’ve ever faced,” Thompson said. “While the rest of the economy is in a recession, the travel industry is in a depression.”
Thompson, who served as chief operating officer and president of Visit Florida a decade ago, said more than 50 percent of the hospitality industry is facing unemployment.
–Jim Turner, News Service of Florida
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Keep Flagler Beautiful says
How is it that we, the citizens of Florida, saw this coming a mile away, but our governor did not? The turning point was spring break, when thousands of party animals were allowed to run amok on the state’s beaches. The beaches should have been shut down. The whole state should have been locked down, for that matter. It would have been a bitter pill to swallow at the time, but so many lives would have been saved and we would not be in the position we’re in right now, where we can’t get control of the spread and businesses are failing. To his credit, DeSantis locked down the senior living facilities and also stopped the invasion of flights full of New York “escapees,” but that was too little too late. Our state leaders failed us, and there will be a huge price to pay for the loss of tourist revenue.
jim dana says
VOTE please.
Another one lost says
Another misleading and disingenuous take on the the pandemic. BREAKING NEWS: “Tourism is down during corona virus pandemic!!!(Duh). DeSantis (Trump’s waterboy) has single handedly destroyed the tourism industry in Florida as now people are flocking to vacation in Portland, Seattle, NYC and Chicago”.
The only thing the Dems have left to avoid a Trump landslide is that the virus sticks around until November. Interesting that our tourism is down but all of the liberal millionaires and billionaires are fleeing NY and California and moving to Florida. How do you explain that?
James M. Mejuto says
This governor of ours’ is such a trump-loving jerk who has messed-up our economy. Imagine: “50% of the hospitality industry”
is struggling to find work. Single people, married with children people, older people and just about everyone else on unemployment.
I can’t understand why the hell Florida voters, voted for this loser!
Well, let’s see if his buddy in the W.H. will help him and the country get through this mess Republicans have created.
steve says
The headline tells the whole story of a failure at the helm in Tallahassee who caved to the pressure and now the goose that lays the golden eggs is dying of C19
Dally llama says
You guys seem more worried about the tourists not being here than the health of those tourists.
Michael Cocchiola says
Visit Disneyworld. Have fun. Get sick. Die. Thanks for visiting!
Gov. Ron DeTrum… oops, sorry, DeSantis.
Only Me says
Way to go DeSantis the ONE TERM GOVERNOR.
Local says
What if we would have just listened to TRUMP in january and closed the borders? What if newyork didnt encourage people to keep living normal lives in febuary? What if california…..well too many what ifs to list….
Just admit Trump was right from the start and liberals and democrats called him crazy. Now THEY blame him? WTF?
The Voice Of Reason says
Only a fool would want to vacation in the epicenter of covid, Florida. That said, there’s plenty of fools that voted for trump. trump and desantis have bungled their handling of covid and the results show. The mishandling of school reopening will result in a further exponential spread and we’ll dig ourselves deeper in the hole. 170,ooo dead in the USA. The world looks at us as idiots because we elected this loser in the first place. Most of the developed countries in the world have successfully flattened their curve, maintained it and reopened their economies and are recovering. Not us. I also like the superspreader bars that skirt the closure order by offering a gourmet menu of hot pockets and hot dogs to proclaim to inspectors they serve food to justify reopening. Bon appetit!
Biden is incompetent says
Why ramble without arguing my point about Trump trying to close the borders in january? Did u even read my post. Can u comprehend simple english?
Keep Flagler Beautiful says
I agree with “Biden Is Incompetent.” Trump is not perfect, but he cannot be blamed about the virus coming into the country. He closed the borders when the gravity of the situation became evident. It was Biden who declared Trump was “racist” for refusing to allow Chinese airliners into the county. If Biden had been president when it happened, there would probably be millions more dead Americans at this point in time. Remember that when you vote. Biden’s hair-trigger judgement in a rush to curry favor with minorities could have cost us very dearly.
Pierre Tristam says
The commenter is repeating falsehoods. Trump’s alleged shut down of travel didn’t stop 430,000 travelers from coming into the United States from China after his measure went into effect. And the claim about Trump’s failed response concerns his cavalier and dismissive attitude about the virus in the United States, and his refusal to take substantial action within the country to contain it, as nearly every other nation did, especially in. Europe and Asia, with far better results. Long after the China travel restrictions, Trump continued to downplay the virus’s effects, in tandem with governors from Florida to Georgia to Arizona, leading to the July surge and additional deaths on a scale unseen anywhere else on the planet. The comparison with Biden is straw-man speculation. The moire appropriate comparison is with how other nations in Europe and Asia finally confronted the virus. By those standards, Trump’s response is an abject failure replicated only by his Brazilian clone. The commenter’s arguments are based on ideology, not fact. Ideological falsehoods have no place in this debate other than to illustrate the distance their purveyors must go to pass off fantasies as fact. Not on this site, KFP.
The Voice Of Reason says
trump shut the borders from China ONLY, on Jan 31 2020. This shut down the covid entering the US to the west coast. Ca, Wa, Or. What covid that came to NY was from Europe. trump shut that travel down on Mar 11 2020. Far too late. By then, the US had huge spread of the covid virus. We lead the world in deaths from covid, BY FAR! 171,000. That number continues to grow every day due to trump and other republican governors mishandling of the pandemic. Your flimsy argument sounds like one that could only come from a fool that voted for trump.
capt says
Tourist is down in FLA, where, tourist are all over the vacation rentals around our neighborhood on the beach. They might not be going to Disney or the other Orlando parks but they sure are at the beaches in vacation rentals.