Santa Monica Hotels Working To Regain What Pandemic, Fires Took

This year was supposed to be a good one for Santa Monica’s rebounding tourism industry. 

The city, along with its cohorts across the country, is still climbing from a pit carved in its tourism industry by the pandemic. But even the positive momentum and pending international sporting events in Los Angeles are struggling to contend with the fallout of last month's Palisades fire.

Experts and industry professionals remain optimistic about the trajectory the city is on, but there are hurdles for it to get back on track. 

Santa Monica was seeing "a slow but steady incline of visitors coming back," with about 5 million in 2024, according to Santa Monica Economic Development Manager Jennifer Taylor, speaking at Bisnow's Downtown Santa Monica Commercial Real Estate Summit on Feb. 13. 

That number is still a substantial decrease from before the pandemic, with the city's 2018 visitor number hitting 8 million.

“We have 40 hotels in the city,” Regent Santa Monica Beach General Manager Younes Attalah said at the event held at the Fairmont Hotel & Bungalows. “I truly believe there's enough of the pie to go around, and that's why we do need to get to prepandemic figures, because we do need these 8 million people so we all can have a little slice of the pie.”

In addition to the change in visitor volume to the city, some types of travelers have also been slow to return. The most critical, hoteliers said, is international travelers. 

Prior to the pandemic, 50% of hotel stays in the city were international travelers, panelists said. Those travelers have not returned.

“We need more international travelers. That's the bottom line. We love the regional, we love the drive market, but we need more international travelers,” Atallah said. 

He is taking a proactive approach to getting those tourists to come to Santa Monica. 

“We're about to jump on planes tomorrow to go to the Middle East, to visit places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Qatar, to try to steal business from Beverly Hills, [to get those travelers] to come here,” Atallah said. 

International travel is down in Los Angeles as a whole. In 2023, LA welcomed 5.8M international visitors, about three-quarters of 2019's total, the Los Angeles Times reported last year.  

Shore Hotel co-owner Jon Farzam said 80% of his hotel’s business is leisure travel, which has been a bright spot in the industry since the pandemic. But Farzam said he’s trying to attract other types of visitors to his hotel — most notably, business travelers. 

“We're expanding a lot of different spaces around and building more spaces that are more conducive for hosting meetings, which in turn, of course, brings more hotel room nights as well,” Farzam said. 

With 300 rooms and a fair amount of meeting space, the Miramar Hotel gets a diversified set of visitors, including group business, corporate and leisure travelers, The Athens Group principal and Vice President Dustin Peterson said. But not all of those sectors are thriving. 

“The corporate business has gone down substantially, and that business is critically important,” Peterson said. “Because while the leisure business is great, there's not enough of it to cover the drop-off that we've got from corporate.” 

Many in the hotel and tourism industry are hoping that upcoming events like the 2026 World Cup will remind travelers about why they should come to Santa Monica. The Santa Monica on display for these events will have to work to counteract the smoky cloud that’s lingering over the city because of the fires.

Some panelists agreed that though Santa Monica escaped the worst of the flames, the fires did some damage to the area's reputation, with many in other parts of the state and country assuming from what they’d seen on television that the city was also destroyed. 

“We're really hopeful that this lineup of events that are coming are going to help remind those really valuable international visitors why Southern California is one of those destinations that needs to be on their bucket list or repeat list,” said Lauren Salisbury, Santa Monica travel & tourism vice president of communications. 

Others hoped that the city’s mid-range and budget accommodations might see a boost from eventual rebuilding crews of contractors and construction workers needed to stay close by the Palisades fire area to work on repairing homes in the area.  

Coming into this year, Salisbury said her team had a lot of optimism about 2025. Both Forbes and Travel & Leisure named Santa Monica as a top travel destination, and the numbers were aligning. 

 “All of our data was showing that this year was going to be the year when we were going to come back,” she said.

 “Of course, the wildfires did cause some disruption to that forecast, but we've been pivoting really hard," Salisbury said. “We're optimistic that the impact from the fires will be short-term and that we'll be able to turn the corner soon.”