All that stuff about Southern hospitality? There’s actually a lot of truth to it, especially here in Savannah.
Ironically, much of Savannah’s public hospitality simply disappears over St. Patrick’s Day, one of the city’s biggest festivals. We’ve worked so hard over the years to market the “party” around the religious and cultural holiday that we’ve ended up attracting the hardest drinkers and tacitly telling many locals and many potential visitors that they really shouldn’t even bother to come downtown at any time other than during the parade itself.
I know a lot of people here in Savannah don’t want to hear that, but consider the following:
- Several prominent, popular, and well-respected downtown businesses simply close their bathrooms for the multi-day holiday, even for paying customers. A few businesses manage this by pretending they don’t have any working bathrooms at all. (No need to name names — you know who you are, and I don’t blame you.)
- Some businesses — shops, tours, etc. — shut down completely during the festival period. We’re telling some of our best visitors — families, cultural tourists, wealthy shoppers, etc. — that they might as well forget about coming to Savannah for St. Patrick’s Day.
- Some hotels jack up their rates (gouging?) even though many of them still had rooms available this year right up until the St. Patrick’s Day weekend. A couple of cousins of mine who were coming through town on unrelated business had no trouble booking a room out near 95 just for the Saturday night; they got around paying the ridiculously high price by using accumulated travel points. And we had no trouble getting a same-day reservation for that Saturday night at Local 11 Ten — we might not even have been able to get a table with such late notice on either the Saturday before or the Saturday after the holiday.
- And we charge $5 for wristbands for outdoor drinking in the “control zone”. Drinking out of to-go cups is legal year-round in much of downtown, but over the last couple of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations we have created this extra cost and bureaucratic burden, which sends negative signals to the most coveted tourists and to locals who aren’t going to pay to do something they’re used to doing for free.
In terms of St. Patrick’s Day planning and regulation, we have followed a similar pattern over my nearly 20 years in Savannah: we market the holiday as a “party”, we have massive drunken crowds that descend on the nearest weekend, we overreact the following year with extra bureaucracy that discourages the kinds of visitors we most want, we then see attendance fall as the holiday moves to an awkward weekday or is marred by weather, and then we’re left having to reconsider how we do things yet again.
And that’s where we will be next year, like we were this year. The St. Patrick’s Day parade was on a Monday this year, and it rained a little. Next year it will fall on a Tuesday, which means that the logical festival period would have to run from Friday through Tuesday. It is obvious, however, that the 2014 bureaucracy didn’t really work for this year’s 4-day festival, and it certainly won’t work for a 5-day festival.
Some data on wristband sales from Eric Curl’s Soggy St. Patrick’s fest dries up drinkers:
St. Patrick’s Day Festival daily $5 wristband sales
Friday: 12,655
Saturday: 45,595
Sunday: 13,124
Monday: 8,199
Total number sold: 79,573 ($397,865 in revenue)
That’s almost exactly the same number of wristbands that sold in the much shorter festival in 2013. Consider those numbers for a second: huge Saturday, with dramatically smaller crowds on Friday and Sunday. And a steep drop off in sales on the actual day of the parade (paradegoers can drink without a wristband but they must have one if they want to drink outside after the parade finishes). Frankly, based on the sparse crowds in the City Market area on the afternoon of St. Patrick’s Day and the fact that a couple of wristband tents weren’t even open where they were supposed to be, I’m a little surprised that even 8,000 were sold that day.
By the way, the revenue goes to cover some costs and to pay for extra stages and bands (some of which were rained out this year and some of which were very poorly attended). I haven’t seen a number yet on the total cost of all the bands, wristband booths, additional staff time in planning, etc., but it was no doubt considerable.
Carrie Bligh with the Waterfront Association gives this explanation for the relatively weak numbers in Eric’s article: ““I have no doubt that if it didn’t rain, our sales would be in line with a four-day event.”
Yes, the numbers would have been higher if the weather had been better, but that quote reflects a complete misreading of the situation. We’re attracting mainly people from the immediate area for hard partying days like that Saturday. Many of those people have to work regular jobs and live their regular lives. Saturday was the logical day to come into town, so they took advantage of it. Those same people aren’t going to come into Savannah and get plastered for four straight days.
And let’s face it: the weather wasn’t atypical for March. It was a little rainy on Sunday, and it was wet and a little chilly on Monday, but I walked around all day in jeans, a fleece, and a baseball cap. I was fine.
Next year, the biggest partying/drinking day will probably still be on Saturday, but are we going to try to milk this thing into a 5-day festival?
By the way, I don’t know what kinds of private discussions are held among tourism professionals about the mess we’ve made of St. Patrick’s Day, but it’s worth noting that Visit Savannah’s Instagram and Facebook made little effort to promote the bands, the drunkenness, the “party”. I don’t mean that as criticism at all, by the way. These are typical Visit Savannah posts around St. Patrick’s Day:
So let’s market St. Patrick’s Day not as a big drunken party but as a beautiful spring weekend when the city’s culture and hospitality are truly on display. We’ll get big crowds, sure, some of which are looking to drink heavily, but the various downtown venues can book bands and offer specials to absorb the vast majority of those who just come to party.
Maybe we should concentrate on just making St. Patrick’s Day into the best version of Savannah instead of into some sad knockoff of Bourbon Street.