Effects of Arnold Sports Festival restrictions will be felt in local economy
Almost immediately after the announcement Tuesday to cancel the health Expo and to bar spectators from most of the Arnold Sports Festival, local hotels started receiving cancellations of room reservations.
Joseph Savarise, Executive Director of the Ohio Hotel and Lodging Association, says the economic impact will ripple through the local economy.
“The impact of this is felt far beyond downtown,” Savarise said. “Our member hotels throughout the greater Columbus market see an impact from this because the demand was so great.”
“That’s not just the profits for hotels, that’s the money that is paid in hotel and lodging taxes to local governments that benefit social programs and the arts and many other things and sales tax to both the local government and the state as well,” Savarise continued.
The Arnold Sports Festival is the biggest event of the year for Columbus area hotels and restaurants. Visitors reserve roughly 18,000 hotel room nights for the event. The Arnold Sports Festival is estimated to have a $53 million dollar economic impact.
Canceling the expo also directly impacts the 1,000 vendors who were planning to sell their goods to visitors.
Danny Lehr arrived Wednesday morning from California. He says he sells coffee and apparel and shipped his supplies ahead of time.
“We have two pallets worth of product just sitting there in the room so if we canceled and didn’t come out we would have just had to put return labels on them and pay to ship those two pallets back and when you have those big heavy pallets, it’s expensive,” Lehr said.
Lehr said he plans to improvise and try to sell some of his merchandise at local gyms over the weekend.