By Brandon Brown | Phoenix Business Journal
While Arizona’s tourism industry has already been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Valley’s prime tourism and events season is right around the corner, leaving organizers with big decisions to make.
In normal years, hundreds of thousands of visitors would flock to the Valley, particularly Scottsdale, from January to March to attend such events as the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction, Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show, Waste Management Phoenix Open and Cactus League spring training. This year, all of those events will still take place, but the numbers in attendance could be dramatically reduced.
Organizers of six of Scottsdale’s largest events joined a conference call hosted by Experience Scottsdale to give the city’s hoteliers, restaurateurs and other tourism officials an update on their events. All of the events’ organizers said that having large crowds at events doesn’t seem possible with COVID-19 still very prevalent in the Phoenix region and across the U.S.
The Fiesta Bowl still hasn’t decided if fans will be allowed in the stadium for the Jan. 2 game. While the college football bowl game is played at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, the teams are contracted to stay at Scottsdale and Paradise Valley resorts. Mike Nealy, the executive director of the Fiesta Bowl, said as of right now, the organization is targeting 25% capacity of the stadium, but a lot of things can change from now and then.
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