tourism in Santa Barbara generates more than $2.24 billion, including $82.9 million in yearly tax revenue and is responsible for 15,000 tourism jobs. In short, if tourism in Santa Barbara sneezes…the South Coast catches a cold.
“tourism brings visitors and employs so many of the great people in Santa Barbara lodging, restaurants, the services that support lodging and restaurants. So I think it’s critical, very, very critical,” said Chris Cline, from Hotel Santa Barbara.
Cline says the health of the tourism industry in Santa Barbara is good, but has had challenges.
“Those challenges, I think, were certainly fires and flooding locally years ago. COVID and inflation!” said Cline.
“At the end of the day, most hotels, most lodging, most restaurants are small businesses that have small margins. So all of those factors make things challenging,” he said.
tourism in Santa Barbara got a boost in the early days of the pandemic recovery, when people…
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