Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce CEO and Committee Chair Paul Niedzwiecki
HYANNIS – Tourism and local officials are optimistic the 2023 summer season will continue to be fruitful for local businesses despite some concerns of leftover COVID effects.
Though assumptions would suggest COVID had major long lasting effects on the tourism scene in the region, CEO of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce Paul Niedzwiecki says the area is only getting stronger.
“We’re expecting a strong summer, but we’re coming off of two record breaking summers. The travel and tourism industry was the number one impacted industry during COVID-19 across the country, but we actually did pretty well,” Niedzwiecki said.
With the Cape having 37% of housing listed as second homes the CEO says that the region has always been a place of refuge in times of national distress and the pandemic was no different.
Niedzwiecki does believe that the length of stay for those residents will be changing, but the tourism numbers will continue to increase.
“Over the last two years and closer to the pandemic, one of the things we saw was an increase in the length of stay as people got used to the remote work options. So we’re starting to see that length of stay come back to a normal one to two week time period,” said Niedzwiecki.
With that knowledge in mind the CEO believes they will produce better numbers this season when compared to the numbers of 2018 and 2019.
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