‘Slow, uneven’ recovery for Miami tourism may not pick up until December, experts say
South Florida’s tourism leaders expect the industry to trickle back slowly over the coming months as the area relaxes COVID-19 restrictions. But they don’t expect anything resembling normalcy before Art Basel makes its annual appearance in early December.
That was the message Thursday at the State of the Tourism Industry Forum, a virtual meeting held by the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Losses to the travel industry have been “cataclysmic,” said Scott Berman, tourism and hospitality industry analyst with PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“These are unprecedented times,” Berman said during the webinar. “This community has taken every punch over the past three decades. Storms, 9/11, recession, Zika ... How does this stack up? You can roll all those crises into one and still not reach the historic metrics we are seeing across the globe when it comes to travel, tourism and hospitality.”
Hotel occupancy in Miami-Dade’s 60,000 rooms plummeted 90 percent from late March 2019 to late March 2020 and 76 percent from late January to late March, he noted. Cruises are docked, and Carnival Corp. on Thursday announced 1,300 Florida layoffs and furloughs, affecting nearly half of its local workforce.
As for what the recovery might look like, Berman said: “I know the politically correct thing to say is, `It’s all going to be OK’ — and it will be. It’s just going to take time. This recovery you are embarking on is going to be slow, uneven. There are lots of levers that need to be addressed.”
The most critical factors, he said: Miami International Airport, consumer and employee confidence, value proposition in wake of an expected recession, and the health of the cruise industry.
“We’re probably looking at 20% of normal capacity on airplanes right now, and we are dependent on the airlines to resume and we know that is going to take time,” he said. “Secondly, our industry needs to create a confidence in the employee and the consumer that Greater Miami is a clean and safe place to work, travel, play and stay.”
Value proposition going forward will be “very, very important,” as many consumers won’t have as much disposable income.
The final piece is the cruise industry.
“The Port of Miami is the largest cruise passenger port in the world,” Berman said. “The health of the cruise industry is going to be very important.”
Like the government reopening plan, the GMCVB’s “Miami Shines” recovery strategy calls for a series of phases. The first, early in the pandemic, was called “Educate.” During that phase, the bureau posted on its website useful tips and information for the public, and organized meetings with hoteliers and government officials to inform the local tourism community about the virus and how it would affect the industry.
The second phase, called “Mitigate,” included initiatives like Miami Eats, which promotes local restaurants’ takeout and delivery options. It started with 320 restaurants and has grown to 1,200.
The final phase, called “Stimulate” will fully kick off when hotels reopen in South Florida — something that isn’t expected to happen before June. Marketing campaigns will target locals looking for getaways — stay-cations — and regional markets within driving distance. Marketers are counting on people with cabin fever who will want a change of scenery, so long as it feels clean and safe.
Leisure driving vacations are expected to rebound first, followed by business travel, domestic air travel and then international travel.
When will nonessential travel resume in earnest?
“I am asked that question multiple times a day,” Berman said. “There is no one date. This is going to be a ramp-up. My advice is, as long as it’s safe and clean and we’re following the protocols, that we work toward Art Basel in terms of being ready and then the 120 days we love to call `The Season.’ ”
One of the nation’s largest medical conventions, the TCT 2020: Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics, is booked for Sept. 23-27 in Miami. More than 12,000 participants from more than 100 countries (65 percent of the attendees are international) originally were expected.
While attendance expectations may change, the convention is still on the books, said GMCVB President and CEO William Talbert III. The bureau has been in close contact with the group, but “things are changing moment by moment,” said GMCVB COO Rolando Aedo.
Connie Kinnard, the bureau’s vice president for Multicultural Tourism and Development, said the American Black Film Festival has been postponed from June to October, the Association of African American Museums convention moved from August 2020 to August 2021, and the Tennessee State University alumni event moved from June 2020 to 2022.
“The fear is we won’t have a vaccine or broader testing,” Berman said about the local tourism recovery. “We’ll have to grind it out. That leisure clientele will come back first. We know how important our international inbound traffic is. We need planes. We need the borders open. I am hopeful the Canadian border opens and we have that drive-to traffic coming back faster.
“This is Phase I. That international travel, whether from Europe or Latin America, is critical to the overall health of our tourism economy. That will take longer.”
In the meantime, members of the local tourism sectors will have to be patient.
“I think we were in denial; I was, for a couple of weeks, [thinking] that the switch would flip back on and we’d see a V-shaped recovery,” Berman said. “But we’re not going to see that. It’s going to be up and down. We’ve gone from denial to empathy to acceptance.”
This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 5:31 PM.