For small businesses that rely on summer tourism, extreme weather is replacing pandemics as the determining factor in how well the summer will be.
The pandemic caused ups and downs in tourism, with holiday rush due to a spike in demand after complete shutdowns. This year, small businesses say the holiday season is returning to normal. But now, they have to deal with extreme weather – many say it’s hurting business, but more temperate places are seeing growth.
Businesses related to tourism have always been at the mercy of the weather. But with heat waves, fires and hurricanes becoming more frequent and intense, small businesses are looking to extreme weather as their next long-term challenge.
For Jared Meyers, owner of Legacy Vacation Resorts located at eight locations, including four in Florida, Hurricane Idalia came in as a Category 3 hurricane on Wednesday, causing a loss of revenue as he temporarily closed one resort and opened another for new ones. Closed for guests. It also means longer cleaning periods and beach clean-ups to repair gutters and other damage, including re-planting sea grass, sea grapes and other plants to protect them from the next storm.
“Even when a hurricane doesn’t hit directly, it wreaks havoc economically, emotionally on those who have suffered firsthand — and on our way of life,” he said.
A lifelong Florida resident, he’s used to hurricanes, but fears their intensity is getting worse. In fact, according to a study published in Nature Communications, the number of storms that dramatically intensify within 240 miles (385 kilometers) of coastline worldwide is expected to increase from five per year in 1980 to 15 per year in 2020. Went.
“It feels and probably will continue to feel like we are moving from one emergency to another on the basis of climate change,” Meyers said.
For Steve Silberberg in Saco, Maine, who runs a company called FitPacking, which guides people on wild backpacking trips in national and state parks and forests, extreme weather is becoming a serious deterrent. National Park Service research has shown that areas where national parks are located are experiencing extreme weather conditions at a higher rate than the rest of the country.
Historic March snowfall in Yosemite – followed by wildfires – affected Silberberg’s planned trip. Another hike was canceled due to unusually heavy snowfall, making The Narrows – part of Zion Canyon in Zion National Park in Utah – impassable due to excessive amounts of meltwater. He had to cancel a trip to the Los Padres National Forest in California because of wildfires and subsequent flooding, which destroyed the roads and made them impassable.
“We are rapidly reaching a crossroads as to how to keep the business viable,” he said. “It seems that about half of our journeys are affected by extreme weather events in some way.”
However, Silberberg is trying to find ways to make climate change work for him. He’s thinking of starting a company that would help people visit places that could disappear due to climate change, like Glacier National Park in Montana or the Everglades in Florida, which are threatened by rising sea levels. are in danger.
This summer in Southern California, businesses faced sweltering heat followed by Tropical Storm Hillary, the region’s first tropical storm in 84 years.
“Pure weather is definitely here to stay,” said Shachi Mehra, executive chef and partner at Indian restaurant Aadya in Anaheim, California. The restaurant is located in the Anaheim Packing House, a food hall in a historic 1919 citrus-packing house near Disneyland.
The restaurant closed for a day in a row during Tropical Storm Hillary, losing a day of sales. The heat has been a big problem, as business slowed down when temperatures soared in late July. Mehra said he suspects the heat is behind the slowdown as things usually start slowing down in late August or September.
The media focus on extreme weather can also hurt business. Dan Dawson, owner of Horizon Divers in Key Largo, Florida, has seen business boom during the pandemic. It is now back to pre-pandemic levels. But when storms like Idalia hit, tourists flee—even though Dawson’s place in Largo was 300 miles from Idalia.
He said, “Once the storm approaches we stop diving and once the storm passes it can take up to two weeks for tourists to come back, and that’s when we No harm is done.”
Still, in the few places that got a reprieve from the heat and storm, businesses are seeing an unexpected boom.
At Little America Flagstaff, a hotel set on 500 acres of private woods that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, the low-90s temperature felt pleasant compared to the record-breaking heat of Phoenix, a two-hour drive to the south. where the temperature was over 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 31 consecutive days.
Fred Reese, the hotel’s general manager, said, “When you look at the temperature rising in Phoenix, you immediately noticed, not only with our hotel, but all the hotels in the area, all our seats went up.”
Similarly, at Mission Point Resort on Mackinac Island, a historic island in Lake Michigan that doesn’t allow cars, temperatures hovered in the 70s, while other locations across the country saw triple-digit heat. This often results in tourists from Michigan clashing with tourists from other states.
“Most of the country is having a great summer and it’s been very, very nice here in northern Michigan,” said Liz Ware, a sales and marketing executive and family member who owns Mission Point. “And so we’ve seen a lot of people from the Texas, Florida, Georgia area coming up north to northern Michigan because it’s a very temperate climate here.”