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Ted Avedesian is getting his sports supply store, Avie’s in Westerly, ready for the summer. He’s wearing a mask, social distancing, and offering hand sanitizer at the register. In his 45 years in retail, Avedesian’s never seen anything like this.
“I’m very nervous, but I have no control over that,” Avedesian said during a recent interview at his store. “It’s really a matter of the economy taking the right turn. It’s a matter of customers’ willingness to go out and do things. And we sell all of those things that they’re going to want to play with.”
The big question right now is whether people are ready to come out and play this summer.
“I just can’t imagine people sitting on a blanket or a towel or a chair, on the beach, with a face covering,” said Michelle Vacca, owner of Beachcomber Real Estate Agency in Westerly. “I don’t know. Can you picture that?”
Vacca manages rentals for 75 cottages in the Misquamicut Beach area. March and April are usually her busiest months for booking summer rentals, but this year she only made a handful of reservations.
The pandemic, she said, is coming at an especially bad time for her and many other business owners.
“Most of the businesses here live for the summer, and that’s when their income that they work all year for comes in in a very short period of time,” Vacca said.
Vacca estimated 10 percent of people who already made reservations with her have cancelled them. People are afraid of getting sick, or they’re not interested in a trip to the beach that’s going to be radically altered by the pandemic.
Misquamicut cottage owner John Speziale said he has only a third of the reservations he had this time last year.
“And I have some personal concerns, because at my age and with some pre-existing conditions, I’m kind of vulnerable,” Speziale said. “We haven’t canceled any renters yet. I hope we don’t have to do that. But I’ve kind of gotten to the point where if we do not get some kind of protocol in place, I might have to do that just for everybody’s safety.”
A lot is at stake this summer. According to state figures, local and state hotel taxes alone generated nearly $14.5 million in revenue last summer. The state says the hospitality industry employs 58,000 people in the state.
Len Lardaro, professor of economics at the University of Rhode Island, said the state has done a great job promoting the industry, but they’ve become too reliant on it.
“It’s too successful,” Lardaro said. “It’s far too important as a percentage of our state’s economy. When you have disproportionately large sources like that and things hit them adversely, it really hurts your economy.
Gov. Gina Raimondo is moving forward with a phased reopening of the state’s economy in hopes of limiting the impact of the coronavirus. But Caswell Cooke, executive director of the Misquamicut Business Association, said there are so many uncertainties.
“It’s not like after a hurricane. You can say: ‘OK, I got to shovel X amount of sand. I got to fix this, fix that, and then I can open,’” Cooke said. “This is something completely weird. So, I can’t stand here and definitively plant my flag and say, ‘July Fourth: business as usual.’ But I can tell you there will be business, and we’ll figure it out.”
There are some points of optimism. Louise Bishop, president and CEO of the South County Tourism Council, says she is seeing some promising trends in the short-term rental market.
Data she tracks from companies like Airbnb and Vrbo show cottage reservations are pacing up as the peak summer months get closer, and rental rates in some areas are actually higher than they were a year ago.
People will come out if the weather is good, Bishop said, and they may think a week at the beach is a safe alternative to flying to destinations like Europe or the Carribean.
“The domestic drive market will be our strength, without question,” she said. “We market in Philadelphia, D.C., New York City, Toronto, Montreal. We know that’s our visitor, and we don’t anticipate huge change.”
Bishop said people visited the beach in strong numbers during the economic disruption of the Great Recession, and we could be poised to see that happen again. Business owners in the region are crossing their fingers and hoping she’s right.
Alex Nunes can be reached at anunes@thepublicsradio.org.
