SAN ANTONIO – As Texas reopens, San Antonio's hospitality industry continues to figure out how to resume operations safely.
Visit San Antonio President & CEO Cassandra Matej said many hotels are still in phase one of their reopening process.
“Hotels are trying to reopen, retrain their staff and just have the cash flow to make sure that they are able to pay their staff and can handle operations,” Matej said.
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Matej said with Sea World and Six Flags Fiesta Texas reopening the week of June 15, many hotels are looking at opening at the same time.
“What I’m calling the sweet spot of dates is really June 15 through June 19,” Matej said. “Most of all of our previously closed properties will be reopened. Attractions will be reopening. A lot of the businesses in the travel sector, such as museums, they have started to reopen. But it looks like between June 15 and June 19, the majority of the travel assets around the community will be reopened.”
To coincide with the reopening, Visit San Antonio is launching a campaign called “Si San Antonio." The campaign is encouraging residents to plan staycations in San Antonio and stay at local hotels and take advantage of deals at approximately 150 local restaurants and attractions.
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Matej said when people stay in a local hotel, the hospitality industry is not the only beneficiary.
“Why you’re staying there at the hotel, 10% of the room revenue is going to go back to the San Antonio Food Bank," Matej said.
Matej said the hospitality industry was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is still too early to tell its overall impact on the local economy.
“We look at Visit San Antonio -- we’re primarily funded by the Hotel Occupancy Tax. We cut our budget by 30%,” Matej said. “You look at all the job losses. I think we’re up to 35,000 or more that have applied for unemployment, and that doesn’t include the people that didn’t apply. That’s a big number of people out of a job.”
Matej said another area she looks at when it comes to the impact of the pandemic is hotel occupancy in San Antonio.
“In March, where the week, two weeks, of spring break would have been upwards in the 90s (percent occupancy), it was in the 20s,” Matej said. “Memorial Day weekend is typically a great weekend, and we saw a significant downturn on hotel occupancy.”
Matej added that as hotels and attractions reopen, the economy will begin to rebound.
“When people come here from outside of San Antonio, they’re staying in hotels,” Matej said. “But not only are they paying hotel tax, they’re going to restaurants, they’re shopping, they’re going to museums. They’re buying things that have sales tax implications that do go to the general fund of the city. And I think that that’s an important point because when you see an industry crumble like we did, that impacts everybody in our community.”