The NC tourism industry has suffered. But now vaccinated travelers are on the way.
Updated travel guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may bring new life to North Carolina’s tourism industry, which has suffered dramatic financial losses amid depressed business and leisure travel throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Officials from the CDC said Friday that those who are fully vaccinated against the virus can safely travel at low risk to themselves — so long as they take precautions like wearing a mask and social distancing — without needing to self-quarantine or test negative prior to departure. Some destinations may still require that travelers provide a negative test result, the CDC added, and it continued to advise against nonessential travel.
But in spite of that latter advice, many around North Carolina and the country are itching to travel. ABC11, The News & Observer’s newsgathering partner, reported last week from the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, where travelers boarded planes headed to their families to celebrate the Easter weekend.
The past year has seen a significant decrease in visitors coming into North Carolina, which the N.C. Department of Commerce says is ordinarily among the top 10 most visited states in the country. The industry plays a major role in the state’s economy, providing hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Wit Tuttell, the executive director of Visit NC, said the state has lost roughly $10 billion in visitor spending in the past year, which adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars lost in state and local tax revenue.
Of the roughly 500,000 people employed by the tourism industry, Tuttell added that around 100,000 are now out of work.
“The quicker we can get people back to traveling as much as possible, the better,” he said. “But the key, really, is to get them to be healthy — because if they start traveling, and they do it the wrong way, that doesn’t really help the industry. In fact, it probably hurts it.”
News of viral outbreaks and increased case counts will only harm the industry in the long run, he said.
Tuttell added that there are direct and indirect economic impacts that result from the loss of travelers.
“When tourism cuts back, and when the hotel lays off a lot of its staff, that’s a direct impact there,” he said. “But when they’re also doing less laundry, that impacts cleaners; when they’re spending less power, that impacts the energy company; when they stop a new expansion, that impacts the construction industry.”
But as news comes that those vaccinated are able to travel safely, the state may see more travelers coming in and out. In North Carolina, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services reports that more than 5 million doses of the vaccine have been administered. As of Thursday, nearly one in four adults in the state were fully vaccinated.
“What we’re really hoping is that the message from the CDC will encourage more people to get vaccinated as quickly as possible,” Tuttell said. “Because the message was really, if you’re fully vaccinated, you can safely travel.”
Slower recovery expected in the Triangle
Though Tuttell expects leisure travel to rebound as vaccinations become more widespread, he added that the Triangle’s tourism industry might lag behind other parts of the state.
“Unfortunately, the Triangle, I think, is one of the big victims in all this,” he said. “It’s not as big a leisure destination as the mountains or the coast. It relies more on business travel, meetings, group events, sports, live performances — and those are the things that have really seen the biggest impact, and probably will take the longest time to get back.”
He expects it will take another year or longer before that kind of travel sees a full resurgence.
Wake County visitors brought in $2.9 billion in direct spending in 2019, according to Scott Peacock, a spokesman for the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau. That same year, tourism in the county generated $284 million in state and local tax revenues.
Among the effects of the pandemic, according to the bureau:
▪ A loss of $13.7 million, or 52.8%, in Wake County hotel and lodging tax collections in 2020.
▪ A loss of $7.4 million, or 23%, in Wake food and beverage tax collections in 2020.
▪ Cancellations of 363 meetings, conventions and sporting events that would have seen a total of 512,695 attendees since March 2020.
▪ Cancellations of 322,855 hotel room nights.
▪ $195.3 million in economic impact from those cancellations.
▪ Either furloughs or layoffs for 66% of the tourism industry’s 67,000 full- and part-time workers in Wake.
“No industry has been hit harder than ours,” Peacock said. But he added that recent weeks have seen restaurants beginning to rehire, and he expects hotels will soon follow.
The bureau expects leisure travel to fully recover in the third quarter of 2021, at which point business travel is predicted to begin to rebound as companies start to return to offices.
He called the updated travel guidelines “a step in the right direction,” and added he hoped that lowered case counts would soon allow for more nonessential travel.
Air travel
Vaccinations are “the key to recovery for airports and airlines,” said Stephanie Hawco, a spokeswoman for RDU. The airport’s survey data shows 76% of respondents agree that being vaccinated against the virus makes traveling by airline safer.
Among the effects of the pandemic, according to RDU:
▪ More than 9 million fewer passengers in 2020 than 2019.
▪ Traffic now an average of 66% less than in 2019, even with preliminary data projecting March 2021 to be the busiest month since the pandemic began.
▪ 61,145 departing passengers at RDU in the third week of March, a 52% decrease from the same week in 2019, though still the single busiest week at RDU since the beginning of the pandemic.
Train travel
Kimberly Woods, a spokeswoman for Amtrak, was unable to provide ridership data for stations around the Triangle at the time of publication. But she added that the railroad service expected “an increase in demand as people get vaccinated and travel restrictions ease.”
On Monday, Amtrak will restore the third daily round trip on its Piedmont train, which provides service between Charlotte, Raleigh, Cary, Durham and other North Carolina cities.
With the additional daily trip, the train will return to its full, regularly scheduled service.
And as vaccinated individuals may soon consider traveling again, Tuttell said Visit NC is preparing to roll out a new travel campaign for “drive-thru vacations.” The campaign will focus on things visitors can do and see without stepping out of their cars, allowing them to engage with the state in a way that minimizes the risk of catching or transmitting the virus.
He emphasized that the ultimate goal is to travel safely.
“It’s great news, but we’re not there yet,” Tuttell said of the new CDC guidance. “We’re not through the tunnel, but we can see light at the end of it.”
This story was originally published April 5, 2021 at 8:30 AM.