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Shopping Centers Today -> December 2001
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LONG ROAD SEEN FOR TOURISM RECOVERY
By Dave Bodamer
Travel and tourism, hit hard by the Sept. 11 attacks, will not recover to the levels seen in 1998 and 1999 until the end of the coming year.
That was the prediction industry professionals heard at ICSC’s Tourism, Leisure and Lifestyle Conference in October. Not surprisingly, discussion of the attacks’ ramifications dominated much of the conference, which was held in Universal City, Calif.
The airline business was already suffering from the economic slowdown before terrorists decided to make airliners their weapon of choice, executives noted.
A recent poll conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based Travel Industry Association of America showed that 70 percent of the 78 million Americans that were planning vacations for the last three months of 2001 are keeping to those plans. But many have switched from flying to driving, pollsters say.
“We’re seeing a rise in people going to destinations that they can drive to, and come back from, much faster,” said panelist Francis A. Wong, chairman of Genesis Delphi Hotel Development, Vancouver, B.C. “We’ll see a higher growth in these segments than at farther destinations in the near future.”
Looking further ahead, some encouragement can be drawn from events following the Gulf War, Wong said. Hotel values fell 28 percent in the year following the war, were flat the year after, but then increased 20 percent for the following four years.
Other speakers also struck an upbeat note.
“Resiliency defines all of us as a people and certainly as an industry,” said Robert F. Welanetz, SCSM, president of Jones Lang LaSalle, Atlanta, and an ICSC trustee, predicting tourism and retail executives will tough out the crisis, as will their customers.
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