Pandemic tourism challenges highlighted

Visit Vacaville Tourism Breakfast itself marks return to normalcy

It is no secret that one of the most devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been on the tourism and hospitality industries, which saw a steady drop at the start and continues to recover.

Vacaville fared better than others in certain areas, according to Visit Vacaville, although the city's tourism arm still had to adapt. Now, with California's reopening and sectors returning to normal, Visit Vacaville has been getting back into the groove of encouraging tourism.

These efforts were highlighted in the organization's 12th annual Tourism Breakfast, which in and of itself, marked a return to normalcy.

The breakfast, hosted in conjunction with California Tourism Month and National Travel & Tourism Week, was not held the previous two years because of the pandemic, but the loosening of pandemic restrictions and the opening of a new business allowed it to return. Previous venues for the breakfast have included the Opera House, Rowland Freedom Center and Imagine That, but this installment was held downstairs at Makse Restaurant, which allowed for a meal to be cooked on site.

Much of the event was centered around tourism's benefits to Vacaville's economy.

“Visiting Vacaville is a good thing,” emcee Dave McCallum said. “It helps them learn about the cool things Vacaville has to offer and it helps benefit our culture and our economy.”

Vice Mayor Jason Roberts also said tourism was beneficial to Vacaville's quality of life.

“It brings in the occupancy tax from hotels as well as sales tax, also a bit of money coming in from special events,” he said. “What that does is it directly feeds into the quality of life in Vacaville, so you're talking about parks, reinvestment into the infrastructure, the downtown, all these key things that make people want to live here but

also want to visit this area.”

Sonya Bradley — chief of diversity, equity and inclusion at Visit Sacramento — talked about what her organization has done to improve its diversity over the last few years, including adding diversity, equity and inclusion to its core values.

“I saw an opportunity for us to use our collective voice and maybe, just maybe, put a dent in the harsh divisions in our community, honestly for humankind's sake,” she said. “If we as an industry can create more inclusive and better positive travel and hospitality experiences, then maybe we can all open a few more minds and shift some hearts.”

Melyssa Reeves, president and CEO of Visit Vacaville, said the combination of the pandemic and wildfires, particularly the LNU Lightning Complex fires which scorched about 50,000 acres in rural Vacaville and Fairfield in 2020, had a devastating impact on the tourism industry overall.

However, she said one silver lining was that hotels in Vacaville did better than most of the rest of the country, where hotels were deemed nonessential and thus closed. The ones that did remain open had an occupancy of about 7%.

“For Vacaville, about the fourth week of the shutdown, we bottomed out at 27% occupancy and bounced very quickly back to around the 50s and we hovered there for most of the pandemic,” she said. “While we are definitely not back to pre-pandemic levels, we had definitely fared better during the course of the entire pandemic.”

To support its partners, Reeves said Visit Vacaville distributed personal protective equipment to local hotels, made weekly support calls, launched the Vacaville Healthy Pledge to create standards for businesses to help prevent the spread of the virus, hosted a modified Restaurant Week in January 2021 and focused its marketing toward residents rather than tourists.

“There was a lot of things our residents could do,” she said. “They could get out and experience our outdoor activities, they could hike, they could bike, they could visit some of our parks. They were all safe to do, so we started focusing on our residents.”

Now, Reeves said Vacaville is seeing consistent growth in occupancy and average daily hotel rates. Visit Vacaville partnered with the city on a Tourism Recovery Strategy, has restarted its tourism marketing programs and brought back some of its events, including upcoming festivities such as its Farm to Table Dinner and Arts Week in September.

Reeves also shared the results of a Resident Sentiment Survey conducted with the city. The survey indicated that 60% of residents believe tourism is good for Vacaville and 53% felt it should be encouraged.

“Our community, by and large, is exceptionally supportive of tourism and tourism development,” she said. “They just want us to do it in a way that's smart.”

The survey also revealed that 80% of residents want more sports and events.

Dr. Robert Eyler, president of Economic Forensics and Analytics, Inc. and a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, said the number of jobs in the travel industry was “very sharply down” from before the pandemic. One major issue in recovery is inflation, where air fare, food and energy prices, and car and truck costs have increased over the last year.

Eyler said domestic spending in California, or money spent on travel by people outside the state, was $116 billion in 2019.

“We don't expect right now to get back to that level of spending until maybe 2024,” he said. “That's a huge hole to get back to the same level of spending, and it's the spending that brings the sales taxes, the TOT (transit occupancy tax) and all the other good things that get showered on our communities.”

Additionally, Eyler said $26.1 billion in travel was spent in 2019, which decreased to $12.1 billion in 2021.

Eyler also said jobs in leisure and hospitality in Solano decreased 10.8% over the last two years.

“That doesn't mean that you're not trying to hire if you're in travel,” he said. “It just means that you probably haven't got the same number of people working.”

Eyler said recovery would be dependent on spenders willing to spend and employers willing to hire against the revenue forecasts. However, he said it was not unique to Solano; almost all of California was facing this issue.

“If you look at Los Angeles (and) Orange County, it's worse,” he said. “Two economies that have large risk characteristics with respect to change in travel.”

Eyler said Solano has had a 35% median home price increase over the last two years in addition to a 2% population increase.

“That's driving that demand and why you saw a price bump, but it's also not anomalous to California,” he said. “There's a lot of places that saw relatively strong price increases.”

With reopening fully in effect, Eyler said this summer is anticipated to be a big year for travel, which he said could create opportunities for Solano.

“What's going on in eastern Europe may, in fact, lead to more local and regional tourism in places like Vacaville because people are now going to not go to Europe during the summer,” he said. “Maybe the economies will open up and it's easier to go on the travel side, so we might actually see some weird gains in wine country between Sacramento and basically along I-80, here in Vacaville being one example.”

However, Eyler said this would be dependent on people being able to go out and spend. Opportunities for tourism growth in Vacaville include its position between two major cities, links to wine country, eastwest movement, growth in the biotechnology sector and close proximity to Sacramento, which Eyler said could inspire travelers to spend money within a 50mile radius, including Vacaville.

“If people are not traveling abroad in long-haul flights, they're gonna do more regional radius travel,” he said. “Vacaville can do more in that sense.”