With summer travel season fast approaching, Northern Kentucky is preparing to welcome an influx of travelers into the region.
Julie Kirkpatrick, CEO of meetNKY, the region’s tourism bureau, anticipates a continued regional recovery from the lows of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“2023 will continue this momentum as we all work to share in this story that NKY is on a roll. As we celebrate the industry at the new and reimagined Turfway Park, we are also looking forward to a strong year in this region,” Kirkpatrick wrote in meetNKY’s 2022 annual report.
At Tuesday’s Eggs ‘N Issues, Kirkpatrick moderated a panel with representatives from three of the region’s largest tourist attractions: Newport Aquarium, Florence Y’alls and Ark Encounter. During the panel, the trio discussed how each of the attractions have recovered since the pandemic, how they adjusted to the unprecedented circumstances and their overall outlook on regional tourism going forward.
“I think all of us, we had this moment where we kept talking about the v-shaped recovery. ‘It’s going to be bad for a little bit and bounce back up.’ It was actually a much longer recovery and we’re still in recovery in a lot of segments,” Kirkpatrick said.
Matt Duda, director of sales and marketing at the Newport Aquarium, said the pandemic required “adapting to the new normal.” These include introducing adjustments such as ticketing reservations and capacity balancing.
“Now it’s a matter of taking all these little changes, these little tweaks that we made to the operations coming out of 2020 and finding how do those now adapt to the real world to our new normal,” Duda said. “The good news is everything is going in the right direction.”
Since then, the aquarium’s attendance has been up 13% year over year, according to Lutz.
“We’ve changed our business fundamentally to address what we had to but in that there were a lot of learnings that came from how we run our operation,” Lutz said.
Florence Y’alls owner Matt DelBello revealed that the pandemic shrouded their rebrand is the season in uncertainty. In January 2020, the franchise announced they were rebranding from the Florence Freedom to the Florence Y’alls. Despite dealing with challenges regarding government-mandated restrictions, the Y’alls adjusted and played games at up to 50% capacity.
“In the end, ultimately it was all worth it because we did something that created a venue for people to actually get some entertainment,” DelBello said. “By far, feedback was nothing but phenomenal. So it was a costly endeavor for us in 2020 but it was well worth it in terms of the equity we built in the community.”
2022 was much better to the Y’alls, with DelBello saying the team’s attendance was up 30% from 2021 to 2022.
“22 was the first time we can truly plan ahead, execute the things that we wanted to execute as the Y’alls get across who we are to the marketplace and it was fantastic,” DelBello said.
Ark Encounter Director of Sales Eddie Lutz said hundreds of tourists canceled reservations during the beginning of the pandemic. In spite of the mass cancellations, Lutz touted how the pandemic allowed their attractions to regroup, focusing on new ways to reach fans such as livestreaming on Facebook. This was the precursor to their online streaming platform: answers.tv.
“We were actually doing as many as four Facebook Lives a day to get the message out,” Lutz said. “What that forced our hand on was something we had been talking about for quite a while which was launching our own streaming service.”
Lutz was optimistic about Ark Encounter’s economic prospects in 2023, saying they were “ahead of the curve.”
“What I’m seeing so far January through April, it’s the strongest January through April we’ve ever had and based on the bookings for the remainder of the year, it’s gonna remain that way,” Lutz said.
The regional tourism industry received positive news in March when meetNKY’s annual report outlined several improvements in several key metrics, which illustrate the overall health of the tourism industry in the region. Regional hotel occupancy rates increased to 67.5%, a 4.6% bump from 2021. In addition, there was a 21% increase in business travel at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport from 2022 to 2021.
Global trends suggest the tourism industry won’t fully recover in 2023, but it’s on the right path. World Travel and Tourism Council, or WTTC, released a report that which details positive metrics in categories such as tourism job recovery and gross domestic product contribution.
“Our Economic Impact Research forecasts that North America and Latin America will recover to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2023,” WTTC President Julia Simpson told CNBC.
