"Any time that we are in a recession, hospitality within the real estate industry is the first one getting hit really hard."
therealdeal.com
How will NYC real estate fare without 65 million tourists?
Visitors accounted for nearly a quarter of retail sales last year
Last year, travel organization Worldstrides organized experiences for 550,000 students and generated $650 million in revenue.
But it was forced to issue refunds as the pandemic canceled trips, leaving the largest accredited travel program in the U.S. $768 million in debt. Worldstrides and 22 other affiliates of parent company Lakeland Tours filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy July 21.
With the coronavirus cutting off tourism like a tourniquet, the damage is spreading across economies — such as New York City’s — and real estate interests that rely on it.
“Any time that we are in a recession, hospitality within the real estate industry is the first one getting hit really hard,” said Yildiray Yildirim, the director of Baruch College’s Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute.
More than 65 million tourists visited New York City last year, according to think tank Center for an Urban Future. And they opened their wallets upon arriving.
Pre-pandemic, tourists were responsible for 24 percent of credit card sales at New York City restaurants and bars and 18 percent of all Visa transactions at retail stores in the city. New York was home to 291,000 tourism jobs, more positions than the finance or tech sector contributed, the think tank reported.
Those jobs are evaporating as people avoid flying, international travelers are largely prohibited from entering the country and visitors from 34 states (
and counting) are being told to quarantine after entering New York.
The hospitality industry has shrunk like ice on hot asphalt. Last month,
dozens more hotels laid off staff in a bid to survive.
Other businesses relying on travel have been similarly hurt. Golden Touch Transportation of NY, a charter bus and limo service, will close at the end of September, according to a Department of Labor filing. Some 213 employees will lose their jobs. In March, Ovation Travel Group laid off 106 employees.
Even NYC & Company, the city’s official marketing and tourism partnership organization, laid off 77 in late April.
Although the airline industry received a
$32 billion federal bailout and smaller businesses have used Paycheck Protection Program loans to tread water, the interconnectivity of the industry means that one company’s financial devastation can have a domino effect, according to Alexander Tiktin, a bankruptcy attorney at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP
“If you have a travel agency filing for bankruptcy, unsecured creditors that are owed debts by that travel agency may have their claims wiped out, and that could have far-reaching effects,” Tiktin said. “For example, if a travel agency owes a substantial amount of money to one of its contractual partners, such as an airline, a cruise line or hotel chain, that entity that it owes money to may not be able to make any recovery.”
The result could be a chain reaction of insolvency across the industry, he said.
Some attractions have reopened, albeit at partial capacity, and are starting hyperlocal campaigns to ride out the shutdown. NYC & Company’s “All in NYC” encourages New Yorkers to eat out, shop and visit tourist spots.
Experts applaud the effort, but hesitate to say it will prevent doom.
“It’s not going to be the same. It’s not going to be enough,” Yildirim said. “But then the question is how to minimize your marginal losses.”
For retailers that benefit from travel, such as restaurants and stores, the past five months have been devastating.
Between 25 percent and 35 percent of revenue at Saks Fifth Avenue is estimated to come from its Fifth Avenue flagship, which is normally filled to the brim with tourist shoppers, according to a 2018 Center for An Urban Future report. This year Saks was forced to
lay off staff.
Other tourist traps, including
Neiman Marcus in Hudson Yards and
Valentino on Fifth Ave, have closed permanently. Both cited the pandemic and changes in how people will shop coming out of it.
That kind of thinking is a concern for tourism experts: If the pandemic has long-term effects on how and where people travel, some businesses will not bounce back.
Even if travel eventually returns to normal, as John Gerner, the managing director of Leisure Business Advisors, expects, he noted that companies will have to justify the high costs of staying open in the city until then.
“If we are now in a situation where that high potential reward no longer seems as apparent, then people are really going to start looking at the cost of operating, and it’s going to put real pressure on them to find ways to economize on that,” Gerner said. “And if they can’t, then they’re just not going to be able to continue operating.”
A new forecast projects a rebound in visitors starting in mid-2021 and taking at least four years to return to pre-pandemic totals.
www.nytimes.com
Tourism, Engine for N.Y.C. Economy, May Not Fully Recover Until 2025
A new forecast projects a rebound in visitors starting in mid-2021 and taking at least four years to return to pre-pandemic totals.
Double-decker sightseeing buses carried fewer than 10 passengers on runs around Manhattan on Monday. Big ferries arrived at the Statue of Liberty with their lower decks nearly empty. Some of the city’s largest hotels had few guests, while others were housing homeless men who had been cleared out of shelters to curb the spread of the virus.
The pandemic triggered a free-fall in tourism to New York City, one of the world’s most popular destinations. A new forecast predicts that the influx of tourists will not fully rebound for at least four years, a somber assessment that reflects one of the biggest challenges to the city’s recovery.
The surge in tourism in recent years has been a vital pillar of the city’s economy, supporting hundreds of thousands of workers across a range of industries, from hotels to restaurants to Broadway.
New York drew a record 66.6 million visitors in 2019 and was on pace for even more this year, according to the forecast released on Monday by the city’s tourism promotion agency, NYC & Company. Now the city is likely to reach just one-third of last year’s total.
The collapse of tourism has been a key reason that New York’s economy has been hit harder than most other major American cities. Hundreds of restaurants, many of which rely on out-of-town visitors, and several large hotels have closed for good. Before the shutdown in March, the hospitality industry provided as many as 400,000 jobs and drew $46 billion in annual spending.
Seven months later, at the end of October, more than 1.3 million residents were collecting unemployment benefits: The city’s unemployment rate is 14.1 percent, more than double the national rate.
The challenge of luring visitors back to New York in significant numbers could become even greater with the virus surging again. The number of daily cases in the city has surpassed 1,000 for the first time since the spring.
Even when the pandemic ends, the return of international visitors, who stay longer and spend much more than domestic visitors, is likely to be sluggish. The number of foreign tourists in the city is not likely to return to its 2019 level before 2025, the forecast shows.
“It’s going to be a very slow build initially,” said Fred Dixon, the chief executive of NYC & Company.
The revival depends on the distribution of an effective vaccine, Mr. Dixon said, which public health officials have said is not likely to happen until late spring or early summer. Until then, the flow of visitors will remain at a trickle, he said, auguring a difficult winter for many businesses.
The loss of tourism has been especially acute for less-educated workers, said James A. Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policy at the Center for New York Affairs. The hospitality industry added 130,000 jobs in 10 years before the pandemic, making it the largest employer of less-educated workers in the city, he said.
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“The tourism boom in recent years meant that thousands of New Yorkers without a college degree saw substantial real pay increases,” he said. The predicted slow recovery “means New York City is likely to go without tens of thousands of jobs in hotels and restaurants that, before the pandemic, were providing steadily rising wages to New Yorkers without a college degree, 80 percent of whom are workers of color,” Mr. Parrott added.
Leisure and business travel skidded to a standstill in mid-March and has been on hold since then. NYC & Company estimates that 12 million people visited the city this year before the shutdown, but the total in the ensuing nine months may only reach 10 million, a figure that includes all of the nurses and other essential workers who arrived in response to the coronavirus crisis.
More than 60 hotels have become temporary homes to roughly 9,500 homeless people who were moved out of crowded shelters to prevent the spread of the virus. The $120 a night per room the city pays hotels that have taken in homeless people has provided badly needed financial relief, though in certain neighborhoods the policy has been
a source of contention.
The disappearance of visitors has ravaged business like TopView Sightseeing, which organizes bus tours of the city. Overall business has dropped more than 90 percent since before March, said Jonathan Hengal, senior director of sales and operations.
Before the pandemic, tours would hold more than 80 people — often reaching full capacity at 89. Now, 35 people might show up on the most crowded weekend days, while on a Monday afternoon numbers could fall below 10, Mr. Hengal said.
“It’s been devastating,” he said. “And we don’t know where this is going. Everything’s been incredibly uncertain.”
Statue Cruises, which ferries tourists to Liberty Island, has been carrying 8 to 15 percent of its pre-pandemic loads on weekdays, said Rafael Abreu, the company’s director of sales and marketing.
“It’s much worse than 9/11 or Hurricane Sandy,” Mr. Abreu said.
Still, there were some tourists to be found on Monday.
At Duffy Square at the northern edge of Times Square, Siria Hidalgo was taking photos with her boyfriend, Luis Miranda, 32. The couple had arrived in New York on Sunday from Puebla, Mexico. Ms. Hidalgo, 33, said the combination of low airfares and pleasant late autumn weather lured them to the city.
“We’re taking all the precautions, and we’re trying to be as safe as we can,” she said. “But once the weather gets colder and if things get even worse, it’s going to be even harder to travel. So we wanted to still come while we can.”
Talia Stewart, 31, held two bags from H&M as she walked through Times Square. Ms. Stewart said she was visiting from Chicago for a friend’s 30th birthday. The celebration was initially envisioned as a night out at bars in Lower Manhattan, but instead, she and five others gathered on the rooftop of a friend’s apartment building to celebrate.
“We have no idea when we’re going to be able to see each other again,” Ms. Stewart said. “So we all got tested, we all kept masks on if we were close together, but it was important to not let the pandemic ruin everything for us.”
NYC & Company counts all overnight guests and anybody who travels from more than 50 miles away as a visitor. After the shutdown, the agency abandoned its forecast for this year and beyond. Its new forecast calls for 38.2 million visitors in 2021, rising to 69 million by 2024.
But fewer than 5 million of those projected 2021 visitors will come from outside the country, the forecast predicts. And by 2024, that number will still not have returned to the 13.5 million international visitors the agency counted in 2018 and 2019.
The typical international visitor spends four times as much money during a visit as the typical domestic visitor does, Mr. Dixon said.
Given that the country’s borders have largely been closed since April, virtually all of those arriving in the city have been domestic visitors. In late summer, tourists began to dribble back, mostly for short weekend stays, Mr. Dixon said. But hotel industry officials said the quarantine restrictions that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo imposed on visitors from most states emptied out many rooms.
Mr. Dixon said he hoped his agency could accelerate the timeline for recovery with a coordinated promotional campaign once travel begins to pick up. Doing so will be onerous, though, because the agency has laid off nearly half of its staff of 140 employees and the city cut its funding twice this year.
The recovery will also be complicated by the dilemma businesses and performing-arts organizations will face in deciding whether to reopen to lure visitors or wait for them to reappear before starting up, he said.
Broadway has repeatedly extended the length of time it will remain closed. The earliest theaters are expected to open is May 30.
“Many look at Broadway as the dinner bell,” Mr. Dixon said. “As soon as that dinner bell rings, people are going to come far and wide.”