Despite the pandemic, some Park City businesses are faring pretty well.Multiple businesses around town have claimed sales are up year-over-year.
Bill Malone, CEO of the Park City Chamber of Commerce and Visitors’ Bureau, said after a rocky start, businesses found their footing during the pandemic.
“We grew in occupancy every month, this summer from the previous month,” Malone said. “So while April and May were pretty non existent, June was really not very good at all. We started to see July once Montage and Stein's and the luxury property started opening, we started seeing that occupancy go up. August was higher than July and September was equal to July, which is unheard of.”
And he said businesses haven’t had to lower their rates to keep people coming in.
“Rates actually have increased over the course of the summer, from the previous year,” he said. “We think what part of that is the fact that we lost a lot of that corporate meeting business that was on the books, you know, maybe for two years in advance that it was booked. And those rooms were resold at basically a higher rate than what they were originally sold at.”
In the past month, Malone said, there’s been an increase in reservations for December. But businesses are tracking 22% behind in reservations compared to December last year.
And while those numbers would have been disappointing a year ago, Malone said this year they look promising.
“Hard to believe that we would be kind of rubbing our hands together and going only 22% down,” he said. “I mean, in previous years, we would be pulling our hair out going, ‘What are we doing 22% down?'’'
He said reservation numbers for January, February and March are still lagging, but he’s not too worried about it.
“We have a feeling that it's going to be that close in,” he said. “I mean, that's just what we saw in the summer, where people were making reservations a week out.”
The city’s budget saw a 20% reduction from last year, but even with businesses up, Malone said the city won’t be able to make any decisions on the budget for next year until the first three months of 2021 are on the books.
