Downtown Seattle visitor traffic inches toward 2019 levels

Over 3 million unique visitors came to downtown Seattle in July, according to data the Downtown Seattle Association released on Friday. That was around 3,400 more than July 2022 but over 1.9 million more than July 2020.

Marc Stiles | August 21, 2023

The number of visitors to downtown Seattle last month topped 3 million people, hitting 93% of the nearly 3.3 million who visited in July 2019.

Office worker weekday foot traffic, meanwhile, remains above 50% of 2019 levels, but still was at 55% in July, the same rate as the month before – despite Amazon’s order to employees to be back on campus at least three days a week.

The Downtown Seattle Association on Friday posted these and other July data points on its recovery dashboard.

Hotel room demand equaled of 99% of July 2019’s level and dipped from June’s demand, despite Seattle hosting the MLB All-Star Game festivities and two Taylor Swift concerts over two weeks in the middle of July.

The number of occupied apartment units climbed to around 56,525, the highest-ever level, DSA reported, citing CoStar data. DSA’s coverage area, which stretches from Uptown and South Lake Union through Sodo, and includes the Chinatown International District plus Capitol Hill and First Hill west of Broadway.

Amazon, which has over 55,000 employees based downtown, could drive the downtown worker rate higher, with the company notifying some employees Aug. 9 that they were out of compliance with its in-person work policy.

On Thursday, Meta Platforms warned employees they could be fired if they don’t comply the the company’s return-to-office order. Workers who are assigned to an office are required to work out of that workplace three days a week or take part in in-person work activities an equivalent amount of time.

Menlo Park, California-based Meta is the third-largest Seattle-area tech employer, with 8,000 local employees, according to Business Journal research.

DSA uses data from hospitality analytics company STR and Visit Seattle to measure hotel market performance, and cellphone data collected by Placer.ai to calculate worker foot traffic.

The latest hotel room demand is not substantially higher than in July 2022, when it was 94% of 2019’s, while the latest level of worker foot traffic was 12 percentage points higher than the same month last year.

Source: Puget Sound Business Journals