A year ago, John and Sarah Cullen were fearing for the future of their Block Island gift shop.
With supply chains choked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the owners of B.I. Tees struggled to put shirts, hoodies, hats and beach supplies on the shelves of the small store in the island’s Old Harbor Historic District.
Not that it mattered. When the shop opened for the “shoulder” tourism season in 2020, shoppers didn’t show up, spooked by the coronavirus crisis. Sales tanked.
The Cullens said a $34,000 forgivable loan from the Paycheck Protection Program kept the business – which includes a second gift shop called Solstice – afloat until sales picked up during the high season in July and August.
This year, the fears of the pandemic have receded like the ocean on the island’s beaches at low tide, and all signs point to a banner season in a summer destination where the tourism industry is crucial to survival.
Anxiety has given way to giddy anticipation. The Cullens opened for 2021 during the first weekend in April, the earliest their shops have come out of their offseason slumber. The shoppers returned.
“Everybody I speak with, we all think it’s going to be very busy this summer,” John Cullen said as he stood behind plexiglass at the counter of Solstice, ringing up the purchases of tourists in late May. “As busy as it was last summer – in the middle of a pandemic – it could possibly be insanely busy out here this year.”
And that goes for summer havens along Rhode Island’s coastline, too.
Tourism officials are projecting a flood of visitors as the Ocean State heads into the heart of the busy season, which is generally from Independence Day to Labor Day.
Confirmed cases of COVID-19 are down, and hotel bookings have skyrocketed. House rentals are in demand, and even Airbnb Inc. says South County is a top destination this year, based on the number of homestays that have been reserved through the online platform.
“The reality is the COVID numbers are declining,” said Louise Bishop, CEO and president of the South County Tourism Council. “There is a more optimistic traveler that desires summer outdoor activities. And now there is less pressure to wear a mask.”
For all the excitement, however, the surge of tourists into the region does present problems, too.
In Newport, officials are fretting that a labor shortage just as an influx of visitors arrives will weigh down tourism’s rebound. And on Block Island, where the population swells from 1,000 to more than 20,000 people during typical summers, some are worried about policing bigger crowds that might be more apt to blow off steam after a year of social distancing and masks.
“I think Block Island is positioned to be as busy as we can possibly handle,” said Jessica Willi, executive director of the Block Island Tourism Council. “There are going to be a lot of people visiting.”
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CHANGE OF PLANS: Evan Smith, CEO and president of Discover Newport, stands among tourists on Thames Street in Newport. He says the organization is redirecting more resources into marketing and advertising to draw more visitors to the city. / PBN PHOTO/ELIZABETH GRAHAM[/caption]
LEAN TIMES
It’s a far cry from last year, when the pandemic dealt a severe blow – at least early on – to Rhode Island’s tourism industry, which annually pumps billions of dollars into the local economy and employs thousands of people.
At Discover Newport, Aquidneck Island’s tourism agency, the staff was slashed from 14 employees to four within weeks of COVID-19’s arrival in the U.S.
“We could have been forced to shut down,” said Evan Smith, Discover Newport CEO and president. “In April and May of 2020, I wasn’t sure we were going to make it. There was a real risk of that, but we kind of went into suspended animation.”
And on Block Island, the owner of the 45-room National Hotel, a grand Victorian-style landmark overlooking Old Harbor, spent the spring of 2020 issuing refunds to people who had made reservations but then didn’t want to chance making the trip. The timing couldn’t have been worse: the hotel had just paid for a new air conditioning system.
The shoulder season – the months in spring leading to the peak period – fizzled.
Still, the year wasn’t a total loss. Tourism officials said the financial picture improved as the summer wore on and, as COVID-19 cases declined, things picked up dramatically in the shoulder season in September, offsetting some of the earlier losses.
Officials at the R.I. Commerce Corp. say they don’t yet have data on the number of visitors to Rhode Island in 2020, or the total amount of spending by those visitors. (In 2019, a consultant estimated the state hosted 26.2 million visitors, who spent a total of $4.72 billion).
But collections of the 5% hotel tax give some indication of the sharp decline in overnight visitors during the pandemic. State records show that $11.9 million was collected in 2020, a 47.2% decline from the previous year. In June through September alone, hotel tax revenue totaled $4.7 million, a 35.5% decrease from the same period in 2019.
On the mainland, Bishop said that in some ways the crisis worked in South County’s favor: it drew people willing to drive longer distances to get to outdoor destinations such as Rhode Island beaches – from places such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. “It became a drive market farther outside of our region than what we normally see,” Bishop said.
‘FRONT OF MIND’
It was those types of demographic shifts that had R.I. Commerce Corp. changing where and how it promoted the state’s tourist attractions last year – changes that have continued in 2021.
Matthew Sheaff, R.I. Commerce’s interim chief marketing officer, said that when the pandemic hit, the agency’s seven-person tourism division took actions such as immediately cutting off digital ads in states such as Colorado that had direct flights to Rhode Island – flights no one was taking during the crisis.
At the same time, because surveys showed people were willing to drive farther to reach tourist destinations, the target area for promoting the state expanded past the usual drive market of Maine to New York. Pennsylvania became a big part of the focus, too.
And while R.I. Commerce paused buying banner and pop-up ads on travel-related websites, Sheaff said the decision was made to maintain promotional activities on social media platforms, primarily Facebook and Instagram, even while cases of COVID-19 were climbing. Local “content creators” were enlisted to help, too, many of them posting photos of themselves wearing Rhode Island-branded masks.
“We kept it going to keep Rhode Island front of mind,” he said.
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EARLY ARRIVALS: Tourists along Water Street, overlooking Old Harbor on Block Island in mid-June. / PBN PHOTO/K. CURTIS[/caption]
R.I. Commerce also continued to seek “earned media” – coverage from travel-related media outlets through a national public relations firm called NJF. For the firm’s $34,000 monthly retainer (it dropped to $26,000 during the pandemic), 133 articles touting the state were placed in publications such as Coastal Living and Men’s Journal in 2020 – coverage that Sheaff estimated was the equivalent of $18.9 million in advertising. Another 66 articles have appeared in 2021 so far, valued at $6.4 million in advertising, he said.
According to Sheaff, between June 2020 and February 2021, R.I. Commerce spent $568,100 on digital ads, which was tracked to 148,393 hotel bookings and $18.4 million in hotel revenue.
Sheaff said the digital-centric marketing campaign will continue in part because it allows R.I. Commerce to track its return on expenditures, an increasingly important metric because the tourism budget is dependent on hotel tax revenue that has dwindled in the last year. As it stands now, the state tourism budget is $3.3 million for fiscal year 2021.
All this has been happening without a permanent chief marketing officer at R.I. Commerce, a key position that’s been vacant since May 2020, when Heather Evans resigned after a year on the job. Sheaff said the agency is conducting follow-up interviews with applicants now, but he wouldn’t say when someone is expected to be hired.
Nevertheless, Sheaff is pressing forward. He said he is already focusing on the shoulder season of September and October, preparing to deploy a mix of digital ads, social media promotion and earned media touting the states fall attractions with the intention of getting “heads in beds” in the offseason.
SLOW CLIMB
Not everybody is seeing a quick tourism rebound, even with more people receiving COVID-19 vaccines and pandemic restrictions relaxing.
“It’s very different for us,” said Kristen Adamo, CEO and president of the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau. “We don’t have beaches. We are not a hardcore summer destination. We’re more year-round.”
While there are hopeful signs of recovery, such as the Omni Providence Hotel and the Graduate Providence reopening in downtown Providence, a full return to normal is still on the horizon for the Warwick and Providence area.
The region is dependent on big events and conventions to fill hotel rooms and local restaurants, and the bureau is eagerly awaiting the reopening of the R.I. Convention Center, which has been used for the last year as a field hospital and testing and vaccination site.
But even after the convention center reopens in August, recovery will be slow.
“Most of the business we are booking now is for 2023, 2024 and 2025,” Adamo said. “When you’re working in the meetings, convention and sports market, you’re working anywhere from 18 months to five years or more out.”
The bureau also continues to wrestle with financial difficulties. Revenue from the hotel tax – a major source of income – dropped from $2.7 million in 2019 to $1.3 million last year. And the $278,300 it collected in the first five months of this year is still far below what’s needed. Before the pandemic, the organization had 23 full-time staffers. Now it’s down to 17 who work four days a week.
“We are putting more resources [into] … July through December because we need to compete in two areas: the summer-fall leisure travel season and the ultra-competitive meetings market,” Adamo said. “We are hopeful that [federal relief aid] and an increase in hotel tax revenue this summer will help us add more dollars and staff as we go through the fiscal year.”
Thomas Riel, PWCVB vice president of sales and services, pointed to one encouraging indicator: The growth of leads flowing into the bureau’s sales department. “We’ve returned to about 70% of our normal sales volume,” he said. “At the height of the pandemic, it had dropped to 5%.”
Even Newport has its share of challenges.
While Aquidneck Island is seeing a resurgence in hotel bookings – a projected 19% increase in occupancy over the same summer period in 2019, according to Commerce – the region is still in recovery mode.
The staff at Discover Newport has grown to 10, but the organization’s financial crisis forced Smith to rethink its direction. He’s started shifting the focus away from the “receptive side” of tourism and more to sales and marketing. The visible example of that: Discover Newport has downsized its 7,000-square-foot visitors center to 725 square feet so it can use the saved money elsewhere.
“We want to get back to our primary mission and focus as an organization, which is: it is our job to get people to pick this destination versus some other destination,” Smith said.
And there’s another looming problem: labor.
Some tourism-dependent businesses are struggling to find enough workers to fill their needs for the summer – a problem that might not disappear until the federal $300-a-week unemployment bonus disappears in September. Smith said he fears some short-staffed businesses will be unable to operate seven days a week.
“What is cruel about it is, just when businesses are trying to recover, they are faced with yet another challenge,” he said. “It’s going to be a long, busy summer for them.”
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NEW FACES: Lars Trodson, president of the Block Island Chamber of Commerce, says he’s been suprised by the number of first-time visitors who have come to the island so far this year. / PBN PHOTO/CASSIUS SHUMAN[/caption]
THE COMEBACK
All signs are pointing to a busy summer on Block Island, too.
On a recent Friday in late May, the ferry carried hundreds of passengers, most not wearing masks and many carrying luggage and backpacks that indicated a weekend stay.
Lars Trodson, president of the Block Island Chamber of Commerce, said his phone has been ringing since late March with calls coming from a mix of regular island visitors and those who had never been there before.
“The boats have been pretty full [and carrying] an astonishing number of first-time visitors,” Trodson said.
While Water Street in the Old Harbor Historic District wasn’t crowded on that Friday in late May, small groups of tourists made their way up and down the picturesque thoroughfare under sunny skies.
At the National Hotel, retirees Jerry and Ida Franklin, of Farmington, Conn., were finishing lunch on the patio behind the hotel. They had visited the island for 25 years but didn’t come last year because of coronavirus fears.
“After we got our vaccine shots, we decided to come back,” Jerry Franklin said. “We were locked inside our house during COVID, and tired of eating takeout. So, we were thrilled to be able to come back to the island.”
Julie Fuller, the hotel manager, is bracing for a busy season. The hotel was already selling out on weekends in late May, and with the restaurant on the hotel’s wraparound porch returning to full capacity, empty seats have been tough to find on some days.
“I hope we can handle it all,” Fuller said.
Willi, of the Block Island Tourism Council, hopes so, too.
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FLOWING IN: Visitors to Block Island disembark from the ferry in the Old Harbor district in mid-June, one of countless boatloads of tourists expected to travel to the summer destination this year. / PBN PHOTO/K. CURTIS[/caption]
On sunny summer weekends, the island often bursts at the seams with day-trippers, hotel guests and house renters, and it sometimes doesn’t mix well with the quaint laid-back atmosphere. This year, it could be worse, some locals say.
In response, Willi’s office has launched a “How to Love Block Island” marketing campaign that notes several island principles to observe while visiting, including staying off the fragile sand dunes and following the traffic laws. Two people were killed in separate motor vehicle accidents on the island last August.
At the popular beach resort Ballard’s Inn, owner Steve Filippi is eagerly awaiting a flood of revelers. He’s seeing a higher-than-usual amount of advanced bookings for the resort’s 22 beach cabanas, which can be rented as part of “girlfriends getaway” and bachelor party packages.
“VIP cabana sales are extremely strong,” Filippi said. “So we are cautiously optimistic that things will be back to normal. It would be payback for last year because last year was so bad.”
Cassius Shuman is a PBN staff writer. Email him at Shuman@PBN.com.
