10 years after Katrina: NOLA tourism setting new records

While it may have seemed a difficult notion to comprehend ten years ago, the city of New Orleans has bounced back from Hurricane Katrina stronger than ever, welcoming increasing numbers of tourists over the course of the last decade.

It was ten years ago this month that what has since become the costliest disaster in U.S. history took place, with the majority of damage to New Orleans taking place on Aug. 29, 2005 after 53 levees were breached and submerged approximately 80 per cent of the city. The disaster claimed 1,577 lives in Louisiana, the hardest hit of the Gulf Coast states.

Kristian Sonnier, vice president of communications and public relations for the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, told PAX that in the years since Katrina, tourism in the city has not only recovered but set new records, with an all-time high of 9.5 million tourists welcomed in 2014, injecting approximately $6.8 billion U.S. into New Orleans’ economy.

Those numbers include increasing numbers of Canadians, Sonnier said, who made up approximately 180,000 of total arrivals in 2014.

In comparison, in the first half of 2005, Sonnier said New Orleans saw approximately 5.3 million guests, while in a post-Katrina 2006, those figures declined to only 3.7 million. However, as the city and its residents recovered, tourism slowly increased as well, to 7.1 million in 2007 and climbing further to 7.6 million in 2008.

According to Sonnier, the CVB’s initial strategy in tourism recovery centred around getting the word out that New Orleans was open and ready for business, with popular tourist attractions such as the city’s downtown area and historic French Quarter spared from much of Katrina’s wrath.

“We wanted to let people know that the city wasn’t underwater,” Sonnier recalled, “that places such as the downtown were open for visitors. A lot of people responded to that.”

In the last decade, Sonnier said that a lot of the growth in tourism attractions have centred around a thriving food scene in New Orleans, where more than 600 restaurants have opened across the city in the last ten years; notable additions include modern Israeli eatery Shaya, with Chef Alon Shaya recently taking home a James Beard Award. In addition, there has been an increased focus on green spaces such as parks, as well as new museums and live music venues. Infrastructure improvements such as extended streetcar lines and bicycle lanes have also benefited tourists and residents alike, he said, while a new airport terminal at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport is set to open in 2018.

The recovery efforts of the last decade have also fuelled what Sonnier describes as a “new sense of purpose and civic pride” amongst residents, who are all too happy to welcome visitors.

“We’ve achieved an awful lot in the last ten years,” Sonnier said. “We did a lot of things that people thought we couldn’t do, thanks to help from people from all over the world who came to visit us at our most vulnerable and we’re eternally grateful for that support.”

While New Orleans has made a substantial recovery from Katrina’s damage, Sonnier said there’s still much work to be done due to the extent of the flooding, particularly in parts of the city such as Eastern New Orleans, which bore the worst of the disaster.

“That part of the city still hasn’t recovered fully yet,” Sonnier said. “Some of the amenities haven’t been rebuilt, but it will happen, it just takes time."

Looking ahead, Sonnier told PAX that the city is preparing to mark a happier milestone in 2018, when New Orleans celebrates its 300th anniversary, with work for the celebrations already underway.

“If they haven’t been here in the past five years, it’s a totally different city," Sonnier said. "But we’re not finished, we’re not relaxing - there’s still more improvements to be made.”

More information is available at www.neworleanscvb.com.