What a summer it’s been for tourism in Alexandria.
With tourism boosted by America’s 250th birthday celebration and Alexandria’s participation in a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” hosting a World Cup team, Visit Alexandria CEO Todd O’Leary and staff reported to City Council on Tuesday night (Sept. 8) that hotel stays are up, revenue per available room is up and so is the percentage of visitors staying overnight.
“A key strategy of ours was to leverage our two blockbuster events, World Cup and America 250, of course, as major reasons to visit Alexandria,” O’Leary said.
Sails on the Potomac brought four tall ships to the city’s waterfront on the Potomac River in June. The event was just one of the city’s several America250 celebrations.
“Once again, this community really showed up to celebrate,” O’Leary said. “The city was festooned in red, white, and blue bunting, flowers and street pole banners.”
Vito Fiore, Visit Alexandria’s vice president of marketing and research, said that there was more than 90% hotel occupancy during Sails on the Potomac weekend in June, and more than 90% occupancy on July 4 weekend.
Fiore reported that hotel revenue per room (RevPar) in the city’s hotels was down nearly 10% in January and rose 3% by the end of June. He also said the percentage of visitors staying in hotels overnight increased from 77% to 82%.
“We really were in a challenging spot in January,” Fiore said. “We were down about 10% to that point in the fiscal year versus previous year in RevPar. But we had such strong performance in February to June that we went from basically being down 10 points to up three points in just that five month period.”
Mayor Alyia Gaskins said that seeing the correlation between events the city is investing in and resulting tourism is helpful.
“I know last year when we were doing the budget, one of the big concerns was, as we’re seeing declines in hotel stays and we’re seeing declines in visitor spending, what does that mean as we’re trying to fund all of the resources we have?” Gaskins said.
Visit Alexandria will present more tourism data at its annual meeting on Sept. 16 at The Westin Alexandria Old Town.
