Cleveland Continues Tourism Rebound as 2022 Numbers Approach Pre-Pandemic Levels

Cleveland is continuing its pandemic rebound with solid numbers, a new report concluded.

The city and county drew 17.9 million visitors in 2022 — nearly 92 percent of pre-pandemic metrics and a 12-percent increase from the previous year, Destination Cleveland announced Tuesday. Twelve percent represents double the overall tourist growth rate for the state of Ohio.

Destination Cleveland President David Gilbert, who’s been with the tourism board since 2011, said the data is a reflection of both the city’s decision to invest in its gems and its ability to sell itself to outsiders in the right way during and after the pandemic.

“In that three-year period of time our industry was totally rocked,” Gilbert told Scene in a phone call. “So, our goal was to gear up, so we could come out of it as fast as possible, and get back to the growth that exceeds our peers.”

According to the data, assembled recently by a team at Oxford Economics, tourism spending amounted to a bit over $6.4 billion spent across the county last year, which the Oxford team suggests will grow in 2024, despite a projected spending stall.

In Gilbert’s eye, the continued rise of Cleveland as a place to stop by rather than shun rests in the continued celebrating, marketing and updating of our “amazing assets.” He points readily to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s $150 million expansion underway, or the 23-acre Irishtown Bend Park that, if built to spec, could easily rival Columbus’ North Bank Park green space along the Scioto River. (Which is very much a tourist destination.)

“Ten years ago, just 34 percent of Clevelanders said they’d recommend Cleveland as a place to visit for friends and family—that’s an abysmally low number,” he said. “Today, I’m happy to say that number’s consistently in the high 70s and low 80s.”

But what if those numbers could be better? While the Bibb administration’s North Coast Lakefront first draft awaits criticism, and Bedrock teases us with their Tower City frontdoor construction, Cleveland’s city center still seems to loom as far as outside perception goes.

In July, shortly after the first Aer Lingus flight soared into Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport, a group of Irish travel writers lamented Cleveland’s “weirdly quiet” Downtown, though they did admire our food scene, as Cleveland.com reported. And in August, Julia Pugachevsky, a New York-based freelancer, wrote in Business Insider about her shock at Downtown’s unmet potential.

“Maybe people were at work, I rationalized, or on vacation,” Pugachevsky wrote. “But it still didn’t explain the jarring juxtaposition between the sheer size of the city and all its attractions — and the actual turnout.”

Though Downtown Cleveland, Inc. is hard at work at a retail study, and Destination Cleveland is prepping its new lighting installation, foot traffic in the core still seems to be overly event-based — what Gilbert calls “drive-weekend” activity.

“It’s an issue. But not an issue that is unique to Cleveland,” Gilbert said. “I think the on-the-ground experience probably isn’t quite as critical. I mean, people aren’t necessarily coming to Cleveland right now to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to just walk around Downtown for two days.’ They have a lot of destinations in mind.”

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