NC tourism industry plans to change along with travelers
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to wane, travel and tourism businesses are hoping to return to pre-pandemic levels this year. On Monday, industry leaders met in Durham to talk about what's next.
Despite North Carolina travel and tourism taking a severe hit during the pandemic, industry leaders say tourism is coming back.
Cree Lawson, the CEO of Arrivalist, a travel analytics firm, said data shows that people are ready for a change of scenery.
"Despite the war, despite the gas prices, despite inflation, road trip activity has quietly returned to 2019 levels," said Lawson. "As many Americans are traveling right now [as] traveled two years ago today at the advent of COVID."
But Lawson said people are traveling now to different destinations – more remote, more outdoors – than they did before the pandemic.
"Germs have changed where we travel," said Lawson. "Where do we go? How long do we stay, and what types of places do we visit?"
He said people are often staying in short term rentals, like AirBnBs, rather than hotels.
"There's a war going on for share of the best overnight guests. Vacation rentals tend to be in remote areas by beaches. They tend to be where customers want to be on vacation. But hotels need to fill up rooms as well," said Lawson.
Lawson adds that people are also choosing more outdoor vacations than they did before. Wit Tuttle, the director of Visit NC, said the return of travel, especially outdoors, is good news for the state's tourism industry.
"The pandemic was really damaging to us. But I think in the long term, it's going to help us because North Carolina is really about outdoor travel, and everybody wants to get outdoors right now. So we've got the product that people want," he said.
Visits to state parks last year were up 1.2 million over pre-pandemic levels. In fact, some of the state's best-known parks were overcrowded. So this year, Visit NC is launching a campaign to encourage people to visit some of the lesser known parks.
"Everyone wanted to get outdoors. They all went to kind of the same place, and so, we're trying to spread that out," said Tuttle.
Despite air travel still being down, Lawson said road trip travel has returned to pre-pandemic levels -- even with the price of gas.
"We are seeing a return of the same level of travel, but [people] are going to different places. They're staying in different places when they stay overnight, and there is going to be clear winners and losers in that," he said.
Another change, Lawson said, is the rising popularity of electric cars with 95 percent of the state's tourists coming by car. As more and more cars become electric, destinations that have a network of charging stations will have an advantage over places where they're scarce.
Tuttell said state tourism is expected to get almost back to pre-pandemic levels this year. But they’re not quite there yet.
"We're still down about 50,000 jobs in the industry, and we've got business to fill those jobs. So now the biggest challenge for us is getting the workforce to do it," he said.
