Report: Strong rebound for Long Island tourism after pandemic dip

Long Island’s $6 billion tourism industry has made a strong rebound after a pandemic dip, according to a report released this week by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office.

In 2022, New York State drew 355 million visits from the rest of the continental United States, with Long Island and the rest of the New York City metropolitan area accounting for the lion's share of visits. That total was up from 271.5 million trips in 2020. Long Island also benefited from a jump in international visitors, especially valuable to a local economy because they tend to stay longer and spend more. The comptroller’s office counted 124,000 international visitors in 2023, up from 96,000 in 2019.

Those visits may have helped preserve jobs. During the pandemic, New York State’s tourism sector lost a third of its 435,000 jobs, and no region has fully recovered them. But Long Island has fared better than the rest of the state. In 2023, the region’s tourism sector employed 46,113 people, from limousine drivers to souvenir shop attendants and hotel workers. That was down just 1% from the 2019 pre-pandemic total of 46,592, according to the comptroller’s office.

Tourism vital

“The tourism industry has been, and continues to be, vital to the growth of our state and regional economies,” said Adam Ostrowski, a spokesperson for Empire State Development, the state’s economic development organization, in an email.

On Long Island in 2022, tourism-generated jobs accounted for 5.7% of all jobs, generated $3.5 billion in labor income and threw off $814 million in state and local tax revenue, according to an Empire presentation last year that used data from the research firm Tourism Economics. That company's data showed regional tourism spending cratering in 2020 at $3.9 billion. In 2022, tourism spending for the first time topped pre-pandemic highs, hitting $6.6 billion. 

Dorothy Roberts, president of Long Island Hospitality Association, a trade group, said that many industry players across the region had benefited from Long Island’s rebound.

“When you go through something like the pandemic, and how the hospitality industry was impacted, there’s always some type of caution there, but overall, the tourism industry on Long Island has gone back to pre-COVID,” she said.

The Suffolk County Planning Commission, citing data from Discover Long Island, Suffolk County’s tourism promoter, said the occupancy rate for county hotels last year was 67.3%. A key indicator, the average daily room rate, was up 36% last September, at $222.47, compared to 2019.

Airports, venues benefit

Long Island’s tourism industry is generally strongest during the summer, when it draws visitors from New York City and adjacent states like Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Roberts said. The region also appears to be benefiting from increased air travel to Kennedy, LaGuardia and Long Island MacArthur airports.

Of MacArthur, Roberts said: “There are increased direct flights from feeder cities — Richmond, Charleston” as well as flights from Florida.

Two factors in particular may have eased the tourism industry’s local recovery, authors of the comptroller’s report said. One factor was the area’s large entertainment venues, like Belmont Park and UBS Arena. Another was the region’s state parks, which stayed open even as long distance travel across the globe was disrupted. Long Island’s state parks drew 29 million visits in 2023, 2 million more than in 2019. Jones Beach’s 8.6 million visits last year were second in the state only to the Niagara Reservation.

Many of the visitors to Long Island parks were likely local, so they weren’t importing economic activity, but the parks could have helped retain spending — ice cream purchases at the beach, for instance — that would have otherwise taken place outside of the area.

Economists at the comptroller’s office said the state’s tourism future would depend in part on the performance of other major global economies whose post-pandemic performance has lagged behind the United States.

Roberts said her group’s members had more immediate concerns. Those average daily room rates may look good, but they don’t show rising costs like labor, insurance and supplies.

“The cost of doing business has gone up, substantially,” she said.