Visit Jacksonville recently announced via press release that Jacksonville is on a record-breaking pace for tourism activity in 2018.
In fact, it’s already broken one record. March 2018 was “the best month ever recorded for the [Jax] hotel and tourism industry” – topping even the activity from when the city hosted the Super Bowl.
Based on data collected by STR, Inc., total hotel revenue from the first three months of 2018 was up by $12 million from the same time period last year. As a result, the average room rate within the city has increased by 5% in price since last year.
Hotel activity and occupancy are considered important markers for the tourism industry, helping to provide a rough measure of visitors to the city.
In March alone, local hotels brought in $45.7 million, breaking a county record and topping last March by nearly 8%.
Just over 82% of Duval County’s available nightly hotel rooms were booked throughout the month – also a new record. It beats the previous record of 81.1% in February 2005, when the city hosted Super Bowl XXXIX.
Overall, hotel occupancy is up 3.5% from just last year, and March marked the 53rd straight month of tourism growth for the city. And with new hotel construction projects being announced almost weekly, this upward trend is clearly not expected to slow down any time soon.
With tourism generating billions of dollars each year for the local economy, the growth of that industry is crucial to Jacksonville’s future. And with tourism continuing to grow in Jax, the future is looking bright.
Sorry to rain on your parade. But perhaps the lower vacancy rate, higher occupancy rates at Jax hotels has a less flattering explanation. There is little reason for someone from Canada to be a tourist in what they call “Jackson”. Most likely they didn’t realise how far “Jackson” was from Orlando, Daytona, Tampa-St Petes(what Canadians call St Petersberg), Miami, Key West, Ft Myers, Ft Lauderdale, Pensacola, Gainesville, Ocala, etc., were exhausted and needed a good night’s rest before continuing on to “Florida”.
That folks is probably why hotels were used slightly more in 2017 than 2016 in “Jackson”.
The bold new what where?
Somehow we don’t think you’re actually sorry to (try to) rain on our parades. If you don’t like Jax, we might not be the magazine for you.