The Canadians are coming! Myrtle Beach hopes for snowbird influx as US border reopens
The day Karen Riordan finally sees someone swimming in the Atlantic on a cold winter day will be the moment one of the last remaining pieces of pre-pandemic Myrtle Beach life has fallen back into place.
Oftentimes, Riordan said, those swimmers masquerading as polar bears are from Canada, the place home to both actual polar bears as well as Myrtle Beach’s largest source of international travelers.
“I’ve always made the running joke that those are the ones that are swimming in the ocean,” said Riordan, president and CEO of the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce. Her joke has rung true many times. She regularly asks the winter swimmers where they’re from, and the answer is almost always Canada. “The ocean isn’t that cold — it’s just that the air is cold when you come out. But the Canadians think it’s downright balmy.”
Last Monday, the federal government finally reopened its land border with Canada to fully vaccinated travelers. For a destination that gets roughly 90% of its visitors traveling by car, including a many of the Canadians who visit, that’s a game-changer for Myrtle Beach’s winter season. Many businesses, golf courses in particular, were heavily impacted by the absence of Canadian visitors last year.
Last year, COVID-19 restrictions on travel, a surge of coronavirus cases after Thanksgiving and the closed border meant that so-called snowbirds were virtually absent from Myrtle Beach. The region’s efforts to become a “year-round destination” collapsed, for at least one winter.
The absence of snowbirds, and in particular Canadians, meant a loss of millions of dollars in money spent on golf courses, in restaurants and on lodging. Most Canadians who visit stay on average much longer than most of Myrtle Beach’s other visitors, Riordan said Many come for weeks or months at a time.
In 2019, Riordan said Canadians visitors spent as much as $26 million in the Grand Strand.
“We’re very grateful that we’re able to get this now because had this not happened, we probably would have lost the season again for Canadians,” Riordan said. “Would some come if the border opened later in January? Yes, but we’re in their fleet migration path right now. November is when they’re already thinking about coming south — just like their geese.”
While they don’t all come at one time, Canadians make up 3% of online traffic to the chamber’s website, VisitMyrtlebeach.com, Riordan said, translating to tens of thousands of visitors each year at a minimum.
Canadians, and cold-weather visitors in general, fill a gap in the Myrtle Beach economy each winter that locals simply cannot. With golf especially, snowbirds are sometimes the only people willing to brave the cold to play in January, industry officials say.
“The Canadian golf business is critical for Myrtle Beach, and that’s been a fact for decades,” said Bill Golden, the CEO the company that operates booking website PlayGolfMyrtleBeach.com. “We don’t have enough locals.”
But Golden said he believes the resurgence in golf in the last year (its outdoor, solo nature made it perfect for COVID) and pent-up demand “will lead to a resurgence in that Canadian traffic for us.”
Waiting for the border to reopen
The U.S.-Canada land border’s reopening has been a long time coming. It was repeatedly pushed back by the Trump and Biden administrations, sometimes creating a feeling of hope among tourism officials who would see that the border would reopen in a few weeks, only for it to get pushed back again.
Even on the domestic travel side, “2020 was like open, close. Open, close. Close, open. Restriction, nonrestriction,” said Stephen Greene, CEO of the Myrtle Beach Hospitality Association. Now, the tourism industry is hoping the border will stay open and that there won’t be any more steps backward.
Not only do locals benefit from the money brought in by Canadians, Riordan said, they also get to have more winter events thanks to the international presence. The region will have more than a dozen more events around Thanksgiving this year compared to last.
And in a few weeks, Myrtle Beach is having its first Winter Wonderland at the Beach festival, a 37-day event that some see as a nod to the destination’s growth in off-season tourism.
With the border reopened, the tourism industry is already working in overdrive to get Canadians interested in returning. The Chamber of Commerce held a symbolic ribbon-cutting last Monday morning celebrating their impending return. In the coming weeks, people are likely to see Canadian flags hanging outside of businesses. Several companies, including the lodging-agency Vacation Myrtle Beach and the amusement park Funplex Myrtle Beach, are offering discounts to Canadian visitors.
As the winter goes on, the list of businesses seeking to cater to tourists from our northern neighbor is likely to grow, Riordan said. This spree will culminate in the return of the “Can-Am Days” festival next March for the first time since 2019.
Lodging businesses and golf courses are already seeing some interest from prospective Canadian travelers. CondoWorld, which operates hundreds of vacation rentals around the region, has already had bookings from Canadians, chief marketing officer Alex Husner said.
Condo owners who rent out their units are “feeling really good right now because we’ve been booked up for winter months and longer in advance than we ever previously have, where the rates are higher than they’ve ever previously been,” Husner said. “The units also get a lot less wear and tear with just one couple or a small family or small group in a unit for an extended period of time.”
Golden, of PlayGolfMyrtleBeach.com, and Steve Mays, the CEO of nearly two dozen area golf courses, said they’ve been fielding calls for months from Canadians seeking to book the second the border reopens. Many of the bookings aren’t even new. Hundreds of visitors, Mays and Golden said, preferred to push back existing reservations from before the pandemic rather than cancel altogether.
“We even still have a few people that this trip started in 2020, and they’ve kept moving it from season to season and are thinking, ‘Alright now in 2022, we can actually take that vacation that we’ve had on the books ... for almost two years now,’” said Mays, who runs Founders Group International, which owns 21 golf courses in the Grand Strand.
COVID concerns
However, the border’s reopening might not cause the floodgates to burst with travelers like the region saw all summer long. In March, hotel and vacation rental occupancy surged from below 50% to above 80% in a matter of weeks and stayed high for the rest of the summer, as the region was hammered with record-breaking visitor volumes that strained businesses and the workers running them.
Canada has been much more cautious of COVID-19 than the U.S., and Myrtle Beach, in particular. Canada’s vaccination rate — nearly 75% — is far above South Carolina’s, where barely 50% of residents have been fully immunized.
Myrtle Beach also became known around the country early in the pandemic as a hot spot for COVID-19 due to near nonexistent health and safety requirements. Most of the towns in the region got rid of indoor mask mandates by March of this year, and Horry County, which is mostly unincorporated, let its mask mandate expire more than a year ago.
The county, which oversees Myrtle Beach International Airport, also failed for months to enforce mask-wearing at the airport, including among its own police officers working there. And while most Canadian visitors still drive to Myrtle Beach, a larger proportion of them come through the airport than almost any other group that visits the region, Riordan said.
Another issue is the requirement for Canadians to have a negative COVID-19 PCR test before they can return home. Those tests can often cost $250 and are only offered at drive-thrus at many clinics now. For a group of Canadians that charters a bus, drive-thru COVID tests won’t be an option.
Other potential issues impacting travel include inflated gas prices and other costs across the tourism industry, as well as the fact that many of the travelers from Canada typically are older, retired individuals who would be at greater risk of negative health outcomes if infected with COVID, Greene said.
Greene said he could see the Myrtle Beach region’s lackadaisical attitude toward COVID-19 negatively impacting interest from Canadian travelers to an extent but that it is hard to predict anything definitively.
“We obviously are excited about welcoming them back,” Greene said. “I look forward to their impact on the community and for tourism. But you’ve got to temper that a little bit with not knowing what impact all those things might have.”
Riordan offered another perspective: Many Canadians who will come this winter likely have already visited here and know what to expect. And she said that Canada’s high vaccination rate and the requirement that all international travelers coming to the U.S. be fully immunized gives her hope that COVID won’t be a strong deterrent.
“I think so many of the people that travel are going to be considerate, and they’re going to be careful, and they want to protect their own health,” Riordan said. Many prospective travelers are “asking about what’s open. And of course, we have a good answer there, which is everything.”
This story was originally published November 8, 2021 at 12:00 PM.
