Where has New York City tourism succeeded and what more needs to be done?

As head of NYC Tourism + Conventions, Fred Dixon steered New York City through a historic crisis that decimated travel to the city. Thanks in part to his efforts, New York City has nearly returned to its pre-pandemic levels of visitation. Dixon is now turning his sights to bigger ventures after leading the city’s tourism bureau for the past decade. Dixon will now be heading Brand USA, a national private-public partnership promoting the United States as a top tourism destination. City & State caught up with Dixon in his final days at NYC Tourism + Conventions to talk about where New York City has succeeded and what more needs to be done to boost tourism. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

What have you been focusing on as areas of improvement for tourism in New York City?

Tourism has been rebounding strongly since the borders reopened, in particular, in 2022. 2019 was the culmination of 10 years of consecutive growth. We got to over 66 million visitors in 2019. And one of the important concepts to remember is the complexity of the New York City tourism demographics. People think of New York as a financial capital – and of course it is, business travel accounts for 20% of our visitation overall – but 80% of our visitation is leisure travel, so we’re a popular holiday destination. Also 20% of our traffic in a normal year is international. We are the most popular international destination in the U.S. for travelers coming from abroad. So it is a complex mix of visitors. That’s one of the strengths of New York and always has been is that we pull on a few markets around the globe.

Overall, we’re expecting in 2024 that tourism will be back to 97% of visitation levels that we saw in 2019. And we’re expecting to be fully recovered and in fact surpass 2019 levels in 2025. That’s in keeping with what the country overall is seeing in other major destinations as well as tourism has rebounded. There are obviously some headwinds out there today. The dollar is strong against foreign currencies, which makes it a little more expensive for international travelers. All of our air capacity has not returned yet, particularly from Asia, where we see Chinese flight capacities significantly less than they were before. And of course, inflation overall, right? No matter where you go in the world today, flights and hotels are more expensive.

You asked about where the opportunities are. China is one of them. In 2019, China was our second-largest market behind the United Kingdom. Our international markets are ranking sort of the same as they were in 2019. A lot of that traffic and businesses returned to normal. China’s the big outlier. We saw more than a million Chinese travelers in 2019. Last year, we only saw about 386,000. We’re expecting a stronger rebound this year. We’re expecting to top 800,000 by the end of 2024. But it’s going to take us a couple of years to get back to the pre-pandemic levels.

The Chinese market has changed a good bit. There’s been a lot of investment within China, encouraging more domestic travel, so encouraging their people to stay within China to travel. We just returned from Xi’an in the west of China, where the U.S.-China Tourism Summit was held for the first time since 2019. And we saw the boom that’s happening in domestic tourism. Then, of course, the flight capacity is only about one-fifth today of what it was in 2019. You take all of those factors, you put them together, combined with a little bit stronger dollar, and you’ll see why the Chinese market is taking longer to recover. It’s the slowest recovering of all the international markets. They were the highest spending market per capita in 2019. We’re obviously very anxious to get that spending back.

There is Empire State Development data showing that some other parts of the state are really outpacing their 2019 numbers in terms of what tourists are spending there in a way that New York City isn’t. Do you think that is just because of the type of tourists coming to New York City? What other factors might play into that?

The travelers to those regions are predominantly from the city. Domestic travel has been strong. We see that in China as well, that’s true all across the world. People are traveling more and, of course, you’re going to travel more regionally right because it doesn’t take as much time and it doesn’t take as much money to travel regionally. So it’s not surprising, because those are mostly domestic destinations and domestic travelers. In a market like New York and other major cities like (Los Angeles) and Miami, you have such a mix of business travelers, which are not fully recovered either.

Business travel is the slowest sector to recover. There’s a few reasons for that. Work from home across the country, people aren’t traveling for meetings as much as they were pre-pandemic, and companies have been cutting travel budgets. Instead of your team of eight people traveling to a conference, you might just send five. Those have an impact on a large complex destination like New York City and would have much less if any impact at all on destinations like the Catskills that are going to be predominantly leisure. And then the mix of international markets too. If you look at all the international markets into the U.S., none of them are fully recovered yet. A few are getting close. India, for example, is getting close to where it was pre-pandemic. And that’s where you’ll see major destinations, urban destinations like New York and Miami and LA catch up.

As you wrap up your time at NYC Tourism + Conventions, are there any particular accomplishments you’re proud of? What will you be doing in your new role at Brand USA?

I’m proud of the team that we have put together over the years in New York. I’m proud of the work that we’ve done to advance diversity in the destination and in our product. We’ve worked for years to grow tourism to the boroughs beyond Manhattan. Now we’re seeing Brooklyn is a brand in its own right. Travelers are coming and staying in Brooklyn and barely even venturing into Manhattan. I’m excited about the future for New York and watching it continue to grow.

I will become president and CEO of Brand USA on July 15. That is the national tourism organization for the United States and its territories created by Congress in 2011. It’s a public-private partnership that pulls down budget from the Treasury. They have a $200 million budget every year on average. And they do really important work promoting inbound travel to the U.S. from around the world. I’m really excited to dig in on that, take what we’ve learned in New York (and) continue to make the United States and its territories attractive to travelers from around the globe.