Rainy weekends, a hotel fire and stormy seas appear to have helped dampen the summer tourism season for Block Island business owners, but the island's top tourism official says there's a bright side to having a "solid" season but one that didn't break records.
“Was it the best summer Block Island has ever seen? Probably not," Jessica Willi, executive director of the Block Island Tourism Council. "But that’s OK. Sometimes it gets crowded out here, and it’s not the worst thing to have less visitation.”
Still, state tax collections indicate that a middling high season was felt at the cash registers of Block Island businesses.
The R.I. Department of Revenue says it collected $298,986 in meal and beverage taxes in New Shoreham for July and August, down nearly 11% from the $335,271 in the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, collections for the entire state in July and August totaled $7.8 million, up 3.5% from a year ago.
And revenue generated by the 1% hotel tax – which also includes taxes on room resellers, hosting platforms, realtors and homeowners – also lagged in July and August on Block Island this summer, declining 7.4% from $208,761 in 2022 to $193,379 this year.
But looking at hotel tax revenue only tells part of the story, Willi says.
“People were feeling that maybe there weren’t as many people as possible here, but everything was more expensive this year, so revenues were up but visitation may have been down," she said. “It depends on who you talk to. Some businesses were up over last year, and some were down.”
The August fire that destroyed the 36-room Harborside Inn in the island's Old Harbor Historic District didn't help matters.
Beyond the loss of the inn, the fire put a temporary dent in visits to the island in other ways. Booking operations for several inns and other accommodations were located in the Harborside and computer records were destroyed, Willi says.
“We had a lot of rooms closed for a whole week,” she said. “So, we expect to see that impact.”
Kate Atwater Butcher has no complaints about the summer.
At the start of the summer season, Realtors had acknowledged that in many places short-term vacation rentals had been lackluster.
But Butcher, the owner and principal broker of Block Island Realty, says she was busy managing 64 private properties that are rented for short-term stays, mostly between May and October. They were booked close to solid this summer and her company is already booking reservations for 2024.
“This was one of the busiest seasons we’ve had. We were a little light at the very end because the kids went back to school,” she said. “But people are already making plans" for next year.
The spike in hotel room rates and the emergence of room-sharing accelerated by the pandemic has helped business, Butcher says.
“We definitely see more people realize it’s cheaper to rent a house than stay in a hotel,” she said. “There is just a huge demand for rentals. And not enough houses.”
That said, some merchants and restaurateurs were noting that business was slower in 2023, speculating that higher prices in the U.S. had persuaded some tourists to give international travel a try.
John Levesque opened the Lunch Bucket in May, a restaurant on Water Street overlooking the ferry dock at the Old Harbor. He says a bunch of rainy weekends hurt business in his inaugural season, keeping many day trippers away.
Still, he plans to keep his place open until the end of December, an outlier among his competition most of whom close after the shoulder season.
In addition to mostly rainy weekends, there were some rough seas in September that may have had additional negative effects, Willi says. The Block Island Ferry canceled all trips for four days.
“Unless the boats run, those people aren’t coming,” said Willi.
The tourism council has no plans to change the marketing strategy, in part because there's no way to strategize against bad weather and fire.
“Most of our marketing is about sustainability, reminding people what Block Island is all about and that if you are thinking of coming out for the day, what you can do to make it a nice experience for everybody,” Willi said.
