Tourism on hold: Myrtle Beach hotel occupancy rates plummet during coronavirus outbreak
Orders from the Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach city councils and Horry County Council on Thursday have essentially put Grand Strand tourism on hold in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Both cities and the county ordered accommodations providers including hotels, short-term rental properties and campgrounds to end reservations through April, and Myrtle Beach and the county additionally closed recreation businesses including miniature golf courses, movie theaters, amusement parks, arcades and moped/golf cart rentals. Myrtle Beach included its golf courses in the closures.
The spring golf season is being wiped out by the spread of COVID-19, but hotelier Matthew Brittain hopes the desperate measures being taken now will benefit the area’s biggest tourism season — the summer.
“You kind of have to decide if we’re in this together or you’re not,” said Brittain, CEO of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, which operates 10 condotels on the Strand, including seven in Myrtle Beach city limits. “I think we are eternal optimists and we’re going to beat the virus and that’s the only enemy. Our council has chosen to do this and we’re 100 percent behind them.
“… They could very well be preserving our summer, and of course that’s the most important thing.”
Strand hoteliers were already crippled by the coronavirus prior to Thursday’s announcements.
Hotel occupancy rates in the Myrtle Beach area fell to 26 percent last week through Saturday night, dropping 55.5 percent compared to the same week in 2019, according to the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation & Tourism. Weekend occupancy was down 76 percent compared to last year with just 21 percent of rooms booked.
South Carolina was down 47.7 percent last week at 36.5 percent occupancy, and SCPRT director Duane Parrish said during a conference call Wednesday that statewide hotel occupancy has been averaging about 15 percent this week.
The SCPRT’s statistics are based on a weekly report it receives from STR Inc., a Tennessee-based company that tracks supply and demand data for industries including hotels. The numbers do not include short-term rentals through businesses that rent privately-owned residences such as Airbnb and VRBO.
The rates include snowbirds, in many cases from Canada, who stay for between one and three months at special monthly winter rates but generally leave by the end of March when those rates expire.
While some Strand hotels were planning to close before the directives from the councils, Brittain said he planned to remain open for the foreseeable future with guests, unit owners and employees all having a stake in the business.
“The real issue for us is employees from the beginning,” Brittain said. “Once we reach an occupancy below a certain amount, and I would say that number is somewhere in the 20-percent range, it’s irrelevant to stay open or not. There’s no profit once you reach those levels of occupancy. We would have stayed open for our guests, for our homeowners and people in the hotel, but it wouldn’t have been to make money.”
Brittain Resorts employs more than 2,000 people at the height of its employment in the summer, Brittain said. He said he is honoring paid vacation time and continuing to pay health benefits for furloughed workers, and hopes to hire them all back if summer business bounces back sufficiently.
“We fully intend to bring back [all employees]. That question can only be answered by how well the summer comes in,” Brittain said. “… Our bookings for the summer have continued even into the teeth of this difficulty, so we have a chance.”
An American Hotel and Lodging Association and Oxford Economics study earlier this month stated that that 44 percent of hotel employees in every state have either lost or are projected to lose their jobs in the coming weeks.
In South Carolina, there are a total of more than 37,400 hotel employees and 129,364 hotel-supported jobs, according to the AHLA, so the study predicts an estimated 14,993 direct hotel jobs and 52,795 total jobs supporting hotel industry could be lost during the pandemic.
This story was originally published March 26, 2020 at 8:57 PM.
