Skift Take
Post-pandemic tourism recovery in major U.S. cities has its challenges. On this podcast, Skift editors explain what smart destinations are doing and why international tourists are having more fun.
Skift Podcast
Compelling discussions with travel industry leaders and creatives who are helping to shape the future of travel.
Skift Asia Editor Peden Doma Bhutia interviews Global Tourism Reporter Dawit Habtemariam about the series of articles he's written recently for Skift.com that detail the plight of U.S. cities, how they are coping, and what they are doing to encourage both domestic and international tourists to return in the wake of the pandemic.
You can find all of the articles referenced in this episode, as well as Dawit's continued reporting on the subject at Skift’s tourism hub.
Bhutia: I wanted to ask you about the articles you’ve written recently on Skift. They are strung together by one common theme, and that's the plight of U.S. cities, how they're coping and how this trend is kind of slowing the overall pandemic recovery. Now what happens in the U…S market is of immense interest to us in Asia, and specifically, like I said, in India, where I live, as India has become the U.S.'s second largest international source market behind I think UK in me, according to according to the US National Travel and Tourism Office.
But then, of course there's this “small” visa processing time that Indians are experiencing for U.S. visas. And we recently also carried news that top U.S. lawmakers have been urging the Biden administration to address the visa wait time issue in India on a priority basis. Could you talk about the articles that you have been working on lately?
Habtemariam: I've covered a particularly good amount of major cities in the U.S. that are very popular. Essentially what happened with the pandemic is cities were hit with huge COVID 19 cases. People left to work from home. They left their downtown offices. Tourism numbers dropped. Fast forward, we're here at this point. The downtown workers have not returned to their offices.
Those people have been slow to come back. And that has somewhat hurt the city economically in many ways, whether it's, you know, just tax dollars to support the city business for the city, whether that's spending on local businesses, for example, like New York City.
But it's missing the amount of of the office workers who spent a lot of money and who spend a lot of time going to Broadway shows after work. So cities are losing a lot of money and at the same time, I guess to go back again during the pandemic period of 2020 to 2022, you know, there was all this unrest happening in cities with a spike in public safety issues.