So how big was the tourism rebound as Arkansas scaled back its COVID-19 restrictions?
In cities that collect advertising and promotion taxes for tourism on hotel and restaurant receipts, the numbers talk.
“We’ve set records for three months in a row, and March was our best month ever for tax collections,” said Steve Arrison, executive director of the Hot Springs Advertising & Promotion Commission.
That reflects a statewide trend of vastly improved collections as commerce has reopened, but a half-dozen local tourism officials across Arkansas noted that the depths of the pandemic were deep indeed. They all added that unless more Arkansans get vaccinated, the gains are fragile.
But numbers don’t lie, and Hot Springs, the state’s top tourism city, is “hitting on all cylinders,” Arrison said. Its monthly collection record, $755,187, was collected in March but recorded in April, since the state remits the tax money to localities after a month’s lag. “We have had records basically three months in a row [with April recording $717,000 in collections and May reaping $715,000].”
Hot Springs, with its national park, lakes and trails, attracted cooped-up people willing to drive in, Arrison said. The records fell despite lingering precautions like the cancellation of popular St. Patrick’s Day festivities and limited crowds at Oaklawn, the casino and racetrack, and at high school basketball championships. “Think of this, we had no convention business but still had our best month ever for tax collections,” Arrison said.
Cities like Fayetteville, Little Rock and North Little Rock also reported vastly improved A&P tax numbers, revenue that should allow the Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau to restore jobs to most of the 37 full-time workers it laid off in 2020.
“We’re budgeted to bring back about 60% of full-time staff in the second half of the year,” said Gretchen Hall, CEO of the Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau. Nearly 100 part-time employees are in line to be brought back as more events return.
Across the river, Karen Trevino, president and CEO of the North Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau, said June deposits for May collections were up 20%, and that January-through-June totals this year were nearly $4 million, up from $3.27 million last year. “The numbers have been up very much from April,” Trevino said. “People have been eager to go once they got their shots. But I’m worried, because so many people in Arkansas haven’t been vaccinated. I don’t understand it, and I don’t want this to push us back to where we were a year ago.” Last week, the state recorded its biggest increase in COVID cases and hospitalizations since February.
Arrison agreed with Trevino’s push for more vaccinations, putting his wish this way: “I’d like to see people get oxygen to their brains.”
While certain restaurants were able to adapt to takeout, a host of hotels shut down or had virtually no revenue for several months in 2020, the tourism leaders said.
“The big picture [in tax collections] is we ended calendar year 2020 down 47% for the entire year compared with 2019,” Hall said. April’s hotel revenue in Little Rock was up 255% compared with April 2020, but 2020 was “a lost year in terms of evaluating numbers,” she said. “Our new baseline year is 2019.”
LRCVB-managed facilities had more than 300 cancellations last year, and events remained down 66% for the first half of this year. The good news, Hall said, is that “event calendars are filling up in the second half of 2021, and we expect large numbers pending no future restrictions or shutdowns.”
Molly Rawn, president and CEO of Experience Fayetteville, said numbers are going “up and up,” but cautioned that “a 20% increase sounds really impressive, until you realize we were down 17% last year.”
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