APPLETON, WI (WTAQ) – Ten years of growth in visitor spending was brought to an abrupt halt in the Fox Cities last year. Tourism brought in $333 million in 2020 across the Fox Cities. That’s down a bit from the record-high of $511 million in 2019.
While the $333 million is still a substantial amount, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was evident.
“Absolutely all of this spending decline was pandemic-related. Here in the Fox Cities, our tourism is really based on large group activities,” said Pam Seidl, Executive Director of the Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau. “[It was a] perfect storm with this pandemic being a disease where you they don’t want groups of people gathering, and our tourism economy is based on large groups like meetings, conventions, sports tournaments.”
2020 spending directly supported 4,185 jobs in the Fox Cities tourism industry with employee income of $96.5 million.
Visitor spending is tracked across 5 categories including lodging, food and beverage, retail, recreation, and local transportation. Lodging suffered the most significant losses with a total 2020 spend of $50 million, down 57% from 2019. Recreation and food and beverage followed with respective year over year decreases of 35% and 33%, and local transportation decreased by 28%. Leaning on the Fox Cities’ draw as a regional retail destination, the retail category only showed losses of 18%, overtaking lodging as the second highest share of the visitor dollar behind food and beverage.
Wisconsin itself fared slightly better in visitor spend losses with only a 28% year over year decrease – $13.7 billion in 2019 to 9.8 billion in 2020. Despite the challenges presented by the pandemic, Wisconsin welcomed 90.7 million visitors in 2020 and employment supported by visitor spending totaled 107,500 jobs. Tourism in the Fox Cities generated $45.3 million in state and local government revenues while tourism throughout Wisconsin generated $1.2 billion, down from $1.6 billion in 2019.
While 2020 saw the major drops, 2021 is already seeing improvements – and more are likely in the next few years. That’s why those in the industry locally are feeling optimistic.
“We are already seeing a recovery. [It’s] very positive, especially in sports tournaments…We knew leisure travel was going to come back, and it’s starting to. Sports tournament events are coming back, and as we head into the summer with more of those events being outdoors, I think we’ll even see that progress even further,” Seidl told WTAQ News. “But it probably still will take a few years, especially on the business travel side and the meetings and conventions travel side. They’ll probably take a little longer to recover, but we’re seeing some great signs right now.”
Hotel occupancy was up for the months of March and April, and Seidl feels confident that they’re seeing very good signs going into the future.
Visitor spending figures are part of the statewide economic impact study conducted by Tourism Economics, an Oxford Economics Company.
The local data covers the 19 communities that make up the Fox Cities –Appleton, Kaukauna, Menasha, Neenah, Combined Locks, Fox Crossing, Harrison, Hortonville, Kimberly, Little Chute, Sherwood, Buchanan, Clayton, Freedom, Grand Chute, Greenville, Vandenbroek, Woodville and (Town of) Neenah.
