HARLINGEN — After the coronavirus pandemic kept them cooped up for a year, families are hitting the road for hard-won vacations, booking flights and hotel rooms as the travel industry gears up for a comeback.
This week, the first wave is booking hotel rooms for the three-day Memorial Day weekend, marking the traditional start of the summer season.
After a year, leisure travel is coming back.
“There’s an increase in our bookings and I expect at all our hotels in our city,” said Steven Villarreal, sales and marketing director at Hilton Garden Inn, the city’s newest and biggest hotel. “We’re seeing a comeback. Bookings are on an upswing. People are getting vaccinated and hitting the road again. We are seeing a nice influx of leisure bookings.”
At City Hall, officials are counting on hotel occupancy tax revenue to rebound.
During 2020, the pandemic led to a $206,000 drop in hotel occupancy tax revenue after collections climbed to $1 million in 2019.
But across town, hotels were apparently doing better business than in many parts of the country, Assistant City Manager Gabriel Gonzalez said.
In Harlingen, hotel occupancy reached about 60 percent during 2020 — that’s about 15 percent higher than the national average, he said.
Nationwide, hotel occupancy plunged to a record low of 44 percent during 2020, down 33.3 percent from the year before, as a result of federal guidelines and state orders aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus, according to Hotel News Now.
Air travel rebounding
At Valley International Airport, this summer’s bookings are expected to come close to 2019 numbers, Marv Esterly, the airport’s aviation director, said.
“The leisure market is roaring back because of pent-up demand,” he said. “We’re truly excited to see travel coming back. I think we’re going to see a big surge. I suspect (summer) will be super strong.”
During 2020, the airport’s bookings plunged 90 percent, he said.
Since April 2020, when just 2,533 passengers boarded planes, plummeting bookings 92 percent, the numbers have slowly climbed, Esterly said.
Now, he said, they’re 18 percentage points off from 2019 figurers.
From February to April, bookings climbed from 13,501 to 25,747, Esterly said.
“There’s no doubt we have been seeing an increase in travel in the last two months,” he said. “I suspect we’ll be close to 2019 by summertime.”
Families booking hotels
At Hampton Inn & Suites, General Manager Heriberto Aguilar’s seeing leisure travel coming back.
“It looks promising,” he said. “The forecast is we’re expected to get an increase of people”
Now, families are back on vacation after the hotel industry’s darkest year.
“It’s been kind of consistent,” Aguilar, who serves on the city’s Convention & Visitors Bureau Advisory Board, said. “You see more leisure travelers — a lot of families are traveling more on weekends now versus corporate travel during the week. The leisure travel is a lot higher. Our corporate travel is usually higher. Companies still have restrictions in place. Obviously, it’s going to take a while to recover from last year’s situation.”
Riding out the pandemic
Throughout the pandemic, travel aimed at responding to the coronavirus health crisis helped Courtyard by Marriott’s bookings hold up, said Michelle Lopez, the hotel’s sales director who serves on the city’s Convention & Visitors Bureau Advisory Board.
“They’ve been high — they’ve stayed consistent,” she said, referring to bookings. “For us, we’ve stayed busy throughout this whole time. We’ve got a lot of projects in our area — wind farms, construction’s always good around the Valley. There was a lot of COVID support in our industry. Even if we didn’t see a lot of leisure travel, we saw a lot of support from the COVID response.”
Now, families are coming back.
“It’s been great, anything from family gatherings to graduations to celebrations — ‘I haven’t seen my relatives in assisted living.’ Some want to get away to see the beach. This weekend we’ll be very busy with Memorial Day travel.”
