BRADENTON – As the busy tourist season approaches full swing, Manatee County’s tourism consultant delighted tourism officials with a milestone set in 2022.
“When we look at the entire calendar year, we see that for the first time ever, we exceeded over a million overnight commercial lodging visitors,” said Ann Wittine, of Tampa-based Research Data Services. “We also had a first-time-ever economic impact of over $1.5 billion for the year. That’s a 20% increase and a 50% increase from pre-COVID 2019.”
Wittine presented her state of tourism update to the Manatee County Tourist Development Council (TDC) on Feb. 13, featuring the latest available statistics related to the tourism industry in the county.
In December 2022, total visitors, number of room nights and economic impact were all up from December 2021, with 73,300 visitors (7.5%), 186,200 room nights (5.8%) and $91,956,200 in economic impact (14.5%).
“We gather this information in a number of different ways,” Wittine said. “We have face-to-face interviewers who are out talking to restaurant and lodging visitors for random surveys. We also talk to management companies, condo associations and others to make sure we get length of stay and party size, so we can calculate these estimates.”
Room occupancy for December was up slightly up (.7%) after being down slightly in the September 2022 report from RDS. The average daily room rate is also up, at $211.38 per day in December 2022 compared to $182.55 in December of 2021.
RDS also keeps track of where people are coming from when they visit the area. After being down in the last report issued in September 2022, visitors from Florida rebounded in December, up 13.9% from the previous year. While European visitors are up 115% from 2021, they have yet to rebound after COVID with only half the number from 2019 before the pandemic. With 12,610 visitors, the Midwest continues to be the largest visitor origin location outside of Florida, but that is down from 2021 by 10.2%. The Southeast region had the most growth with a 22.3% increase from 2021.
The report also included information about Sarasota Bradenton International Airport (SRQ). Data from these reports helps the airport locate markets that are underserved, so they can work to get direct flights to those markets, which boosts tourism to Manatee and Sarasota counties. SRQ reported serving 3.85 million people in 2022, up 21.6% over 2021.
Wittine predicted that the spring tourism season underway on Anna Maria Island will be busier than ever, saying that almost every property surveyed in January is reporting more bookings than last year, with many being fully booked through March.
