Bay Area tourism spending fell by $550M in 2020, but leaders have plans to revitalize the industry.
Visitor spending was slashed more than $500 million in 2020, but leaders have plans to get the industry back on track
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended Bay Area tourism worse than any other economic crisis in modern history.
In San Jose, where city leaders had built a strong business travel base and were just beginning to tap into the leisure market, tourism nearly came to a screeching halt last year.
Spending from international tourists in San Jose dropped by 69% while total overnight visitor spending was slashed in half — falling from $1.03 billion in 2019 to $463 million in 2020, according to estimates from Tourism Economics.
“2019 was fantastic and the first three months of 2020 were even looking better and then boom — we hit a brick wall with the pandemic,” said John LaFortune, the new president and CEO of Team San Jose.
The pandemic’s effect was felt similarly in San Francisco — the region’s hottest tourism market — where total tourism spending in the city dropped 77.7% from 2019 to 2020. Total visitors to San Francisco were down 61%.
On top of the loss of tourist dollars, more than 65,000 employees who contributed to San Francisco’s tourism industry lost their jobs during the pandemic, according to data from San Francisco Travel, the city’s tourism agency.
To learn more about what has happened to the region’s tourism industry over the past 14 months and how industry leaders plan to come back from this, we sat down, virtually, with LaFortune. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Q How does the hit that the Bay Area tourism industry has taken due to the pandemic compare to other financially difficult times in our history?
A There have been times where things have plunged, but nothing as substantial as what we’re going through now. With the dotcom crash and the Great Recession, this surpasses that considerably. It was really due to the shelter-in-place. No one is going anywhere, travel has stopped, nothing is open, everyone working from home and no one is hosting any events.