Restaurant reservations climbed by 2% this week nationally, with a .4% increase for the state of Georgia. Georgia seems to be rapidly approaching pre-coronavirus levels, one day only being 3/4ths of what it was the year before. Overall, reservations on the national and Georgia level are down approximately 47% of what they were last year.
What is difficult about gathering data for this year is discerning between seasonal traveler declines and pandemic related declines. While the daily average of traveler throughput dropped by 40,000 this week or 5.7%, this data would be misleading. 2019 daily average checkpoint numbers for the comparable week dropped by slightly more, at a 6.7% decrease. This means that though there are currently no signs of airline traffic increasing past 30% of last year at this time, it also isn’t being negatively affected anymore than it already has been.
The employment in construction industry saw a 6% drop in April which reflects the substantial job loss among construction industry as a result of the pandemic. The full force of the pandemic also hit hard on Georgia building permits in April compared to 2019. Construction jobs and building permits started to increase from April lows as construction resumed gradually in some areas from May.
Total preliminary initial unemployment claims were down 11% from the previous week. The industries with the largest upticks in new claims was Real Estate and Rental and Leasing seeing a 122% increase in new claims, while the Retail Trade industry saw a 28% decrease in new weekly initial claims since last week.
For the week of August 24-28, the index comprising 30 bonds was up 2.1% Year-to-Date, a decrease of 0.2 percentage points since last week.
For the week of August 24-28, the Georgia public firms index increased 1.5% this week in price. The index is down +1.9% YTD, an increase of 190 points.
Nationally, hotel occupancy was down 34.5% compared to 2019 this week. Atlanta was 4th out of the 25 biggest lodging markets in the US for the least occupancy rate declines (-28.4%). Small Metro/Town (55.8%), Interstate (53.6%), and Suburban (50.8%) hotels continue to be the best performing hotels in terms of occupancy for 2020.
Restaurant Reservations are up significantly this week, 5% for the US as a whole and 2.24% in the state of Georgia. This coincides with a decrease of daily cases in the US, as the country continues to quell the virus, these numbers should continue to recover. Currently restaurant reservations are slightly more than 50% of what they were the year prior. Fine dining has been affected significantly more than the rest of the industry, with casual dining and bars recovered up to approximately 70% of what they were last year.
After a promising two weeks of increasing passenger throughput, TSA traffic has stagnated again this week. Dropping 1.5% on average compared to last week, it failed to set a record high on Monday like it has historically. With a high of 841,806 passengers, 21,143 below last week’s high there may be a cause for alarm, however the market continued to surge up in the airline sector this week, with a 5% increase in Delta stock by midday Monday and other airlines following a similar trend.
In Part 1, David Springstead and Collie Greenwood of MARTA discuss the future of mass-transit in the City of Atlanta using blended services and options which leverage pilot technologies. In Part 2, Kari Watkins of Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, discusses the impact real-time transit information has had in sustaining urban communities and their economies through her OneBusAway Program.
Photo of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 college football season. That's when the sport was hit by the Spanish flu and the end of World War I.
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