SWFL tourism outlook after back-to-back storms

How is Southwest Florida tourism doing after we endured two major storms almost back to back?

On Thursday, Lee County held their tourism outlook annual meeting, which gave us an idea of what is going on in the world of tourism for the county.

The number of visitors was around 2.9 million people in 2020 during COVID-19, and then it bounced back to 4 million visitors until … Hurricane Ian hit the area.

As a generational spot for many people, we asked Miriam Dotson, the communications manager for Lee County Visitors and Convention Bureau, how people can help as we
continue to rebuild.

“Well, come visit us because there are restaurants open, there are businesses, there are hotel rooms,” said Miriam Dotson, communications manager for the Visitors and Convention Bureau.

The communications manager said that the more people that come, the better.

“The more you come and enjoy that, the more we can help to get things back on track [and] help the workers get back into full motion,” Dotson said.

We walked around downtown to find vacationers to find out what made them choose to visit Southwest Florida.

“I kinda looked on the map and was looking for some nice small American city, like a typical American city, and we were looking in between Tampa and Naples, and this is somewhere in the middle, so we were like, yeah, why not stop and just have a look around and see how the city is?” a vacationer said.

And despite hearing about the previous storms, that didn’t stop them.

“We kinda were worried when we saw the news a few weeks ago, but we were like, well, we booked a trip, so we just will wait for the news, and it was fine, so we came here,” the vacationer said.

The one word Dotson used to describe Southwest Florida was “resiliency.”