LOS ANGELES -- Tourism to Los Angeles will not fully rebound from the pandemic until 2025, tourism officials said, with overseas visitation and meetings/events not recovering as quickly as domestic visitation.
Los Angeles Tourism said at its annual Market Outlook Forum, held here last week, that the city's 46.2 million visitors in 2022 were about 91% of the 2019 total. This year, the number of visitors is expected to reach 49.3 million, about 97% of 2019.
But when broken down, the numbers show that overseas visitors -- international travelers excluding Mexico and Canada -- totaled 2.3 million in 2022, just 47% of 2019. Overseas visitation is forecast to reach 3.35 million this year, 68% of 2019.
That slow overseas recovery has an outsize impact on spending, said Los Angeles Tourism CEO Adam Burke, with three domestic travelers equaling the spending of just one overseas visitor.
"I don't think it's overstating it to say we will not see full economic recovery in L.A. until we get all of our overseas markets back," he said. "We've got a ways to go."
The late opening of China has been especially impactful for Los Angeles. China was the city's top overseas market in 2019 with 1.2 million visitors.
"Even if China only recovered to 38% of 2019, it would be our top overseas market," Burke said.
The Chinese traveler is exactly the kind of visitor that LA Tourism is targeting. "We're certainly less focused on volume than we used to be, and much more focused on those markets and customers who are highest yielding," said Burke.
Burke said that LA Tourism is "laser-focused" on trying to accelerate the pace of recovery. On the bright side for L.A. is domestic leisure travel, which Burke said has led the recovery and "is essentially fully recovered," with 43.4 million visitors from the U.S. expected this year.
And the city is not about to lose the group Burke called "our bread and butter." LA Tourism launched an $8.6 million global campaign that kicked off in the U.S. last week "because we certainly don't take our foot off of the gas when it comes to domestic leisure travel."
With talk of a looming recession, he is especially mindful of engaging that core traveler.
"I think that's part of the reason why we will continue to heavily invest in domestic leisure, because it is a very competitive market," Burke said. "The good news is so far we have not seen any real reduction of demand. But what is starting to crop up, and there are a couple of consumer-sentiment studies that I would point to, is that consumers are increasingly concerned about a downturn in the economy. It's certainly something we're watching closely. At least for the time being, it is not suppressing visitor demand."