After having just opened our newest downtown location on Abercorn Street, Nov 16th, we were thrilled to sponsor the Downtown Business Association’s first in-person meeting on Nov. 18. It was a pleasure to meet and mingle with the downtown business owners who will be a huge part of our new downtown clinic. We were able to share with them not only the award-winning urgent care and routine care services we offer, but also the full range of occupational medicine services, including experienced workers compensation injury evaluation and treatment, drug and alcohol testing, PFT’s, audiometry, lab and radiological testing, rapid and PCR COVID testing and much more.
We received so much positive feedback from the attendees and association members regarding the opening of our state-of-the-art clinic in the downtown market and the significant improvement of access to excellent quality healthcare, that is in-network with insurance! DBA members were also excited about the access for residents and the many visitors that travel to Savannah every year.
Visit Savannah President Joe Marinelli’s presence as the keynote speaker at the event was also fortuitous. Although we expect downtown businesses and residents to make up the majority of our patients, our business model also includes service to tourists visiting our great city. We are so grateful for hospitality leaders like Mr. Marinelli’s team who have done their best to encourage tourism this year and are making plans for a better 2021. We’re excited to be in the position to serve as downtown Savannah’s most-loved healthcare provider, especially as the economy and tourism industry continue to grow into the next year.
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Transcript of Video
Local businesses in downtown Savannah were hit pretty hard during the height of the Covid 19 pandemic, but city officials say tourists are slowly coming back to town. The Downtown Business Association and Visit Savannah leaders held their monthly luncheon today to keep business owners updated. Fox 28’s Cody Thomas was there and gave a look into the future of Savannah’s tourism during the pandemic.
Visit Savannah President Joe Marinelli calls the current state of Savannah’s tourism a “tale of two stories.”
“Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, our occupancies continue to be low, generally in the 45 to 55 percent range. But on the weekends, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, our occupancies are getting up into the mid-70s and even mid-80s,” Marinelli said.
Marinelli said the good news is leisure travelers are coming back into town, but the bad news is there are still few business travelers and no conventions, or meetings, which keep the weekday numbers down.
“All of those kinds of events really stimulate higher occupancy numbers where we would typically be in the 70 percent range mid-week, and in the 90 percent range on the weekends,” he said.
He also said hotel/motel tax collections are running at about 48 percent of what they expected this year. But one of their main focuses remains on the Visit Savannah campaign which aims to get drive-market visitors into town.
“When tourism gets back to normal, we feel confident that we’ll rebound,” J. Parker Limited Owner Dale Parker said. J. Parker Limited in Savannah was shut down most of April. Dale said local traffic is what kept them afloat. “That can make the difference between a business surviving and not,” Parker said.
Catherine Grant also just opened Expercare Health downtown on Monday and said though there were challenges, she’s confident in the community’s support.
Catherine Grant, CEO/Founder of Expercare Health: “It’s everything, we love to serve the visitors that come, of course for their intermittent needs, but being able to serve the communities that you live in is what it’s really all about,” Grant said.
Marinelli also said they’re continuing to market toward cities that have nonstop air service to Savannah’s airport.
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