Pandemic’s devastating toll on native tourism business, one 12 months later.

GREEN BAY, Wisconsin (WBAY) – A year ago this month, the tourism industry in Wisconsin nearly came to a standstill due to the pandemic.

The past 12 months have not been pretty either for local restaurants, hotels, and attractions, or for businesses related to the hospitality industry.

When the calendar turned to March 1 a year ago, tourism guides said Covid-19 was on their radar.

“But the industry had no idea what was going to happen around the corner,” recalls Brad Toll, president of the Greater Green Bay Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Within a few days, the state basketball games for girls in the Resch Center were canceled during the tournament.

“I think reality really saw that this was going to be pretty serious, but even then it was fine, it will probably take a month or two,” recalls Toll.

However, the state’s Safer at Home order was only the beginning of troubled times.

“And we thought well, we’ll probably stick to summer and then we canceled everything and pretty soon we were in fall and we thought our salvation would be football season and we all know what happened there and I think that as it got scary, ”says Toll.

In 2019, before Covid, Toll admitted that visitors spent $ 718 million in Brown County.

While the numbers for 2020 won’t be known until May, Toll knows they won’t be pretty.

A Packers season without fans is a $ 150 million success, and a year without conventions, meetings, and sports tournaments is another $ 100 million loss.

“Our occupancy dropped to 16 percent in April, and it’s usually around 60, so I mean the bottom is falling off everything,” says Toll.

Not much has changed since last spring, and Toll says almost every business involved in tourism struggles to stick with it.

“What people don’t see may be the business is open, but a company that employs over 100 people has five. I think the tourism industry that I last saw at the national level still has an unemployment rate of 23 percent. From an economic point of view, this was devastating, ”says Toll.

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