Orange County tourist development taxes, the money collected on hotel stays in the area, were down again in June.
Hotel occupancy rates were down 4.3 percent in June compared to the same time in 2022. Advance hotel bookings for the rest of the summer are down by 1.2 percent.
Alan Fyall is a professor at UCF’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management and says the heat and the political climate of the state could be to blame.
But he thinks most of it is the market leveling out post-COVID.
“A lot of people really wanted to come to this area, they did through COVID. A lot of people came just post-COVID. I think it's just the market adjusting," said Fyall. "So, I would say that's probably about 70%.”
Fyall also says higher home insurance prices and inflation mean people have to choose between basic necessities and paying for a theme park ticket.
Rollins College Crummer Graduate School of Business professor Mark Johnston agrees. He said the trends we're seeing, are about the market balancing out.
“There was a lot of demand for travel. People have been getting out for more than a year. And we saw that reflected, say in the March numbers, which were extremely high," said Johnston. "Since then they've started to decline. And it may well be people have been here, they've come and they've moved on to other things.”
Johnston says numbers in general, even though they are lower, are still high enough, that he's not concerned for the health of Central Florida's hospitality industry.
TDT numbers were down in April and May this year, with several conferences pulling out of Orlando citing new laws, like Stop Woke, along with a statewide ban on AP African American History and the state's new history standards.
