When Will New York City’s Tourism Return?

At the beginning of the lockdown, when the weather was just starting to turn I could not think of a better place to live in all of Manhattan than the few hundred feet off of Central Park West that I called home.

The normally bustling 9 block stretch where we lived between 72nd street (the famed Dakota where John Lennon was murdered) and 81st street (the Museum of Natural History) had suddenly turned into a scene from I am Legend. You know, the one where Will Smith is literally the only human in New York.

Normally filled with tourists stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to take pictures, megaphones broadcasting instructions in foreign languages, and double-decker busses rotating like a conveyor belt along the park I could suddenly lay down in the middle of the avenue and not have to worry about a stranger giving me a disapproving look never mind a car running me over.

This is great, I thought. We will finally be able to enjoy the park in peace for a few weeks before the madness picks up again. Morning runs were quiet and the 10 or so familiar faces would give a wave or a head nod when we crossed paths. In the evenings, my girlfriend and I would walk through the park and down fifth avenue with no one in sight. When do you ever get to experience New York like this, we would exclaim.

A few weeks however quickly turned into months and once the city began to reopen locals began to return. Traffic and pedestrians were back, but one thing was still glaringly absent. The tourists were nowhere to be found. Buses were absent, local street vendors such as peanut and pretzel carts had decreased sharply in number, tour guides and groups were no longer lingering outside the Dakota.

It is now November and they are still nowhere to be found. This is not great. It’s sad and scary and costing a lot of people their livelihoods and could be the beginning of a perpetuating cycle.

In 2019, New York’s tourism industry marked its tenth consecutive year of growth, bringing in almost $7 billion in state and local taxes and supporting more than 403,000 jobs, according to NYC & Company, the city’s tourism marketing agency.

New York’s abrupt lockdown in March came just before the annual onslaught of tourists. Officials had been expecting more than 67 million visitors in 2020, about one-fifth of them from outside the country.

Now the city’s tourism officials have been left wondering how they will ever revive an industry that brought in about $45 billion in annual spending and supported about 300,000 jobs. International arrivals to New York are down as much as 93 percent, and the people and businesses of the city’s tourism industry are on the brink.

Fewer than 400,000 international passengers arrived at Kennedy in August, down an astounding 89 percent from more than 3.5 million during the same month last year. The city’s food and beverage sector has lost nearly 200,000 jobs since March. The hotel occupancy rate has been more than halved from 2019 levels. Out of 46 Times Square hotels, at least 26 have shut their doors; 90 of the 162 restaurants are shuttered.

Officially, the Times Square area employs around 180,000 workers, provides 15 percent of the city’s economic output, and generates $2.5 billion in tax revenue, according to 2016 data collected by The Times Square Alliance, a local trade group. During the city’s lockdown, pedestrian counts in the square fell by over 90 percent, and now, despite an uptick, foot traffic is still down by 72 percent compared to the same period last year.

Broadway which has announced it will remain closed until at least 2021 contributes more than $15 billion to the local economy and 97,000 jobs. An industry, that also draws throngs of tourists from all over the world and thus whose continued closure contributes to the battering of the tourism economy.

An economy is a living breathing organism and no sector is isolated as almost all are dependent on one another. Depressed tourism affects restaurants, souvenir shops, pedicab bikers, street vendors, the MTA, museums, etc. Office closures similarly affect restaurants and retail which further affects residential real estate since they are the hallmarks of living in a metropolis like New York. Restaurants, shopping, and Broadway-besides sight-seeing are also the major draw for tourism. And on and on the cycle goes.

As Europe finds itself in another lockdown and the restaurant industry stares down winter with limited if any indoor dining tourism does not seem on the verge of returning any time soon. Even if it does pick up regionally and domestically, it will most likely be nowhere near the levels needed to revive most of these businesses. The overwhelming majority of these are small businesses.

Roger Dow, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Travel Association, says “The key thing for people to understand is that the travel business is really 83 percent small businesses. Even though you’ve got the big names of the airlines, cruise companies, and hotel companies, the majority are small business operators, restaurants, shops, tour guides, all people that really can’t afford to hang on very long.”

Implementation of a working vaccine cannot come too soon for these businesses and New York’s economy as a whole. One thing is for certain, if tourists can’t or won’t return within the next 6-8 months, they might not have much to return to.