College of Charleston’s tourism workplace has had its most difficult year at any time | News
Daniel Guttentag experienced developed rather utilized to delivering superior news.
Because the slide of 2017, he is been director at the Faculty of Charleston’s Business office of Tourism Assessment, which performs intently with the resorts, places to eat, attractions, functions and tour operators that comprise the community customer sector.
Daniel Guttentag is the director of the University of Charleston’s Business of Tourism Evaluation. Supplied.
Guttentag’s business office tracks metrics for visitation and vacation investing, analyzes the financial effects of blockbuster functions like Charleston Wine + Food and displays the effectiveness and progress of Charleston County’s lodging inventory.
His business office is one particular modern day way the College of Charleston has aided shape and shepherd the Lowcountry’s economic system more than the previous two centuries. It illustrates the college’s value and affect in just the community.
Explore Charleston, the team that markets the region to website visitors, turns to Guttentag’s workplace for vital tourism quantities, and the figures instructed a apparent tale.
Consider 2020, the college’s anniversary 12 months, which was place on pause to a huge diploma. Tourism was growing 12 months just after 12 months in Charleston — rising to the issue that the thought of “overtourism” was turning into a hot topic in city. Then COVID-19 strike.


What experienced been anticipated to be one more document calendar year for tourism turned out to be unlike anything the industry experienced noticed.
Guttentag’s business office is common with measuring how disasters have an affect on journey. But generally, those people disasters are hurricanes and flooding, resulting in losses in hundreds of thousands of pounds, not billions, and placing off vacation for times, not months.
This time, there was “no conclude in sight,” Guttentag stated.
“All of a sudden, it really is like we’re beginning from scratch,” he reported. “So it was type of fascinating from a exploration standpoint, and, just in phrases of our mission of doing work with the sector more broadly, I assume it was definitely a specific option for us to help out.”
Most of the assignments planned for the yr have been scrapped, and all target was place on the pandemic.
For Guttentag’s once-a-year presentation to the Charleston Location Vacation Council, the matter was, “Charleston tourism in the time of COVID-19.”
It was only mid-May perhaps then, and the photo of what Charleston tourism seemed like in the center of a pandemic was continue to fuzzy. Numerous inns that shut their doorways briefly were just setting up to reopen, and Guttentag recalled talking about ways to make their guests really feel safer, like putting up Plexiglass at the entrance desk, having employees members put on face masks and limiting the potential in elevators.
When it truly is not unconventional for Guttentag’s office to listen to from lodge operators and other enterprise entrepreneurs hunting for precise quantities or stories, this earlier yr, community experts were being achieving out for more time conversations.
“They really needed to chat for 30 or 45 minutes just about concepts and views about what we could be looking at,” he mentioned.
Hoteliers communicated what they were hearing from attendees and observing on the floor at their houses, and Guttentag’s business office took a wider watch, evaluating Charleston to the rest of the state and region, tracking steering from health and fitness experts and looking at what Individuals were being stating in nationwide surveys about journey sentiment.
“We have the reward of acquiring a lot more time to shell out on the lookout at study that the normal supervisor of a lodge isn’t going to have the time to spend carrying out for the reason that he or she has a million other obligations maintaining their lodge up and functioning,” Guttentag explained.
Lodging stories that investigate coordinator Melinda Persistence compiles regular demonstrate just how a lot the resort sector was impacted by the pandemic in 2020. Ordinary occupancy was down virtually 40 p.c from the prior 12 months, and the ordinary each day rate for a place dropped by about a fifth.
Although it was noticeable just by going for walks as a result of the most preferred tourist places in downtown Charleston that tourists ended up in small provide past yr, the common studies, virtual talks and check out-ins from the Office of Tourism Investigation gave a clearer image of just how a great deal of a setback for the industry COVID-19 was.
Guttentag and Endurance are doing the job on a whole evaluation of 2020, which will demonstrate how a great deal the sector’s financial impression shrank in the course of the wellbeing crisis.
That and other reviews are also setting a commencing issue for the vacation industry’s recovery. Past summer season was a “roller coaster,” Guttentag reported, due to the fact journey metrics fluctuated together with COVID-19 circumstance quantities. Now that vaccinations are remaining administered, though, he predicted that upticks for tourism now are much more very likely to be sustained.
Bookings are previously climbing, and Guttentag mentioned he would not “see them going back down again,” especially due to the fact the vaccine rollout aligned with the get started of the standard chaotic season in Charleston.


But, Guttentag stated, it is tricky to say something with certainty these days.
Pre-COVID, Charleston’s tourism trends were pretty predictable.
Then, 2020 was “a totally new yr and a fully new time.” In many approaches, 2021 is still uncharted territory, also.
“It is just kind of hard to think about having back again to ordinary lifetime all over again,” he stated.
Guttentag does sense optimistic about Charleston’s chances at a potent showing, specifically in contrast to some other locations. The area’s beach locations fulfill a pandemic-fueled need from travelers for outdoor recreation, and it can be also an asset that the Holy City’s “bread and butter” is leisure journey and not slower-to-get well group organization and conferences.
That, in addition travelers’ cabin fever, could be the recipe for a thriving summer.