Panama City Beach sees record tourism numbers in March
PANAMA City BEACH — Soon after reaching a new milestone, Dan Rowe, president and CEO of Go to Panama City Seaside, said the city is without a question an “all-American beach front town.”
In accordance to Rowe, March of this calendar year was the busiest March in the tourism heritage of Panama City Beach, creating virtually $2.9 million in tourism advancement tax earnings. That is about $400,000 a lot more than March 2021, which earlier held the title.
It should really be mentioned that 2021 was the Beach’s busiest calendar year ever, bringing in about $36.75 million in tourism tax collections.
“This calendar year, we understood that we ended up heading to maintain on to most of the business we acquired last 12 months because the fundamentals of our neighborhood are strong, (but) we didn’t know if we would exceed last year’s (figures) due to the fact we were anticipating a industry correction (immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020),” Rowe said. “We were being thrilled that the benefits of March came in where by they had been.
“… It definitely goes to exhibit the relevance of that excellent seaside experience in people’s life.”
The city also was capable to break the document with out relying on crowds of spring breakers to raise its economy in March — a thing PCB counted on before 2015, when huge crowds of get together hungry, faculty-aged vacationers would flock to the location just about every 12 months.
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It was in 2015 that fed-up officers permitted a record of ordinances particularly specific to halt the Spring Break insanity that at the time plagued the city and gave it the title as the Spring Split capital of the United States.
“There was a emotion at one particular issue in time that we experienced to have Spring Crack (tourism) to be thriving as a beach front location, (but) we have established that to be not precise,” Rowe mentioned.
In addition to a improve in mattress tax collections this March, passenger website traffic for the thirty day period at Northwest Florida Seashores Worldwide Airport (ECP) was up a lot more than 5% in excess of March 2021.
Extra than 136,000 men and women visited the airport this March while about 129,000 visited in 2021. The facility is positioned off Condition 79 in unincorporated Bay County, just north of Panama City Seaside.
ECP also experienced a history-breaking calendar year in 2021.
“March of 2021 started our genuine growth period of time,” reported Parker McClellan, executive director of ECP. “As we glance at March 2022, it continued that 12-thirty day period craze, and when you have (far more than 5% expansion) that is a authentic constructive.”