Fort Myers businesses hope for 2021 tourism boost

The future is uncertain for many businesses in Fort Myers. Airport and business leaders will discuss a 2021 sales and marketing plan at a tourism outlook event Thursday.

The Visitor and Convention Bureau will give us a glimpse of airport stats, including passenger and travel trends. It will also look towards the future, and what effects we can expect long-term from the pandemic.

Two businesses that took a hard hit are both concerned the season will not bring in the money they need to recover.

“I’m applying that same sort of mentality to season,” said Kyle Cebull, owner of Millennial Brewing. “I’m not expecting the windfall that we would normally see in January, February, March and April. I’m really expecting more of the same, which is uncertainty and unknown.”

“It’s been up and down the same way the cases are,” said Martin Drexler, owner of Wise Guys Deli. “Every time there is a reported case, we lose more business. We used to see maybe 70, 80 people per day in my short lunchtime; now I’m seeing about 20 to 30.”

Something the Visitor and Convention Bureau has already noted: the majority of our tourists since March came from other parts of Florida, not out of state. Only time will tell if the usual snowbirds will start to migrate south.

“I’m hoping the snowbirds will get down here,” Drexler said. “I’m hoping these tourists will get here, I’m hoping everyone will come on back.”

“For us it was less about being on the brink of going out of business, and it was more about ‘Well, now what?'” Cebull said. “Now we’ve had an entire year, basically, where we’ve made no progress towards the goals that we’ve set and so now what does 2021 look like? How long is this going to go on? I don’t think that anyone can say for sure ‘this is what’s going to happen.'”