The City of Myrtle Beach passed an emergency ordinance ordering all accommodation businesses in the city, including hotels, motels, Homeaway rentals, Airbnb and campgrounds, not to accept any new reservations for any guests arriving before May 1st.
All in-house guests must leave their rooms by Sunday, March 29th.
This is troubling news for a city that entirely depends on tourism. The city is also described as a tax and spend town according to key business leaders.
North Myrtle Beach
The City of North Myrtle Beach passed a similar ordinance. Effective immediately, no short term (3 night) rentals can be taken.
The move by both cities closes all attractions and dine in restaurants as well.
According to WLTX:
A year after the coronavirus pandemic began in South Carolina, News 19 checked in with businesses to find out how they’ve been impacted and how they’re doing today.
SC Chamber of Commerce
Swati Patel, interim CEO of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, says this year has been incredibly unprecedented.
“This time last year, we had unprecedented surplus in revenues, we were having a super low unemployment rate, things were going extremely well for us economically,” Patel said. “Fast forward to now and things have completely changed.”
The interim CEO says the state of business from March 2020 to March 2021 has seen dramatic change.
When the pandemic started and many businesses closed, there was much less demand for products and services, which led to an increase in unemployment.
“The chamber’s role back then was really just as businesses are trying to figure out what to do and how to get help, we helped them navigate a lot of the federal laws that were being passed at the time,” Patel explained. “We had the stimulus bills, the paycheck protection program and our job here at the chamber was to really provide that assistance and help communicate between government and business so that they could understand how to take advantage of different resources that were available back then.”
While some businesses struggled, others like grocery stores, bike stores, construction companies, home improvement, delivery services and other business sectors were doing well. The CEO believes manufacturing has remained relatively strong.
“We had a lot of areas in our economy that improved greatly and then we had a lot that obviously just really went downhill pretty quickly. I would say our small businesses were the ones that were impacted the most,” Patel said.
The state lost 10% of small businesses due to the pandemic according to the SC Chamber of Commerce. The interim CEO says more businesses could close if they don’t get relief soon.
The tourism industry has also struggled with many people not traveling to the coast. Many hotels and conference centers rely on people and companies coming to their location. The chamber thinks things may start improving late this summer.