(Press-News.org) While new research from West Virginia University economists finds that presidential inaugurations have gained popularity as must-see tourist events in recent years, major security threats will keep visitors away for the inauguration of President-Elect Joe Biden.
Published in "Tourism Economics," the study, by Joshua Hall, chair and professor of economics, and economic doctoral student Clay Collins, examined the impact of the inaugurations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump on hotel occupancy in the Washington, D.C.-area.
Daily occupancy rates around the inaugurations were four-to-six times higher than the next largest event in the sample. The research team also concluded that inaugurations tend to serve as multiple-day tourist events, with hotel occupancy rates seeing positive leads and lags.
"We got the idea to look at this because of the public debate over the size of the Trump inaugural compared to the Obama one," Hall said. "While we couldn't answer that question given the data, that got us thinking about how important inaugurations are as tourist events."
The available hotel data dated back to 2010, therefore the researchers could only focus on the second Obama inaugural (2012) and the Trump one (2016). One of the complicating factors of accurately comparing the two is that the Trump inaugural also attracted scores of protestors to the area. The Women's March on Washington was also held a day after the Trump event.
Nonetheless, the economists found relatively little difference in the scale of the impact on hotel occupancy overall. One difference is that the Obama inauguration saw greater increases prior to the swearing-in ceremony, while the Trump event saw upticks after inauguration day.
Both inaugurations accounted for large increases in hotel occupancy, considerably more than any tourism-related sporting or cultural event.
Throughout his various studies, Hall has found that unique, one-off events, such as concerts or music festivals, typically serve as greater economic boosters than sporting contests, which tend to attract only local residents.
"Regular events like baseball games may draw a few people from out of the area, but most are locals," Hall said. "You need something that is a once every couple - in this case, four-- years event to get people to consider traveling.
"My sense is that interest in attending inaugurals has come from lower relative costs of attendance over time, both because of improved roads and lower airplane costs, along with rising real incomes. It is far easier to get to get to Washington, D.C. from Morgantown since the completion of Interstate 68, for example."
But, any economic impact from the hotel and tourism industries will be minimal, if any, this time around.
The FBI and Washington, D.C. officials have warned of threats ahead of Inauguration Day, Wednesday (Jan. 20), after the recent deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol. The Presidential Inaugural Committee has asked Americans to stay home and celebrate virtually. In-person attendance is limited to Congress.
As National Guard units took up residence inside the Capitol, Airbnb announced it is blocking and canceling reservations in Washington, D.C. during inauguration.
"This year will definitely be very different," Hall said. "It will not involve the multi-day celebrations of past inaugurals."
INFORMATION:
To achieve full occupancy, hotels used to rely exclusively on experience, concentration and human abilities. Then came online booking, which made the reservation collection process faster, but did not solve the risk of turning down long stays because of rooms previously booked for short stays.
To avoid overbooking (accepting more reservations than there is room for) in some cases online sales are blocked before hotels are completely booked. The solution that the University of Trento has just discovered could change the life of hotels by increasing the number of occupied rooms and, therefore, in the revenue of hotel owners.
For an average Italian hotel (50 rooms), ...
More than half of all university students in the United States have experienced high levels of psychological impact from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Matthew Browning of Clemson University, US, and colleagues.
University students are increasingly recognized as a psychologically vulnerable population, suffering from higher levels of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and disordered eating compared to the general population. Moreover, college students have been among the most strongly affected by COVID-19 because of uncertainty regarding academic success, future careers and social life during college, among other concerns.
In the new study, researchers collected data on 2,534 students ...
Investors who bet on tropical forest conservation and reforestation to solve global warming by storing carbon in wood face huge uncertainties because the science behind predicting carbon stocks is still shaky. Even the best Earth Systems Models fail to predict how carbon stored by tropical forests varies from place to place. The New Phytologist invites scientists doing the "most-exciting, ground-breaking research" to review timely topics in a way that non-scientists can understand. Helene Muller-Landau, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) was chosen to write the authoritative Tansley Review ...
MIAMI--Scientists used a 600-year-old marine sponge to reconstruct a record of ocean temperature in the North Atlantic revealing past volcanic activity as well as the current global warming trend from the release of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gasses into Earth's atmosphere and absorbed by the oceans.
The University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science-led research team used geochemical proxies to reconstruct a 600 year-long record of Atlantic Ocean temperatures from the skeleton of a sclerosponge (Ceratoporella nicholsoni).
The basketball-sized sclerosponge was ...
These findings validate the significance of the previously described first threshold - the point when the damage to the acinar cells of the pancreas is sufficient to trigger the infamous inflammatory cascade (Barreto and Saccone, 2010) - while highlighting the importance of a second threshold, namely the point when a person develops clinical symptoms of the disease sufficient to warrant going to hospital.
"This transcontinental collaboration of pancreatologists drew on their vast clinical and research experience spanning decades investigating the pathophysiology and treatments ...
Deep in the Brazilian Amazon River basin, scientists led by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History fish research associate C. David de Santana discovered a small, river-fed lake filled with more than 100 adult electric eels, many of which were upwards of 4 feet long. On its own, this was an intriguing discovery, electric eels--a type of knifefish rather than true eels--were thought to be solitary creatures.
But in this lake along the banks of the Iriri River in Brazil's state of Pará, the researchers witnessed the eels working together to herd small fish called tetras into tightly packed balls. Then groups of up to ...
Underwater seagrass meadows may trap, extract and carry marine plastic debris to shore, thereby helping to remove plastic litter from the sea, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.
Previous research suggested that most plastics end up in the seafloor and that some are washed back to shore; however, how this occurs was unclear.
Seagrass meadows are widespread in shallow coastal waters and are involved in trapping and binding sediment particles that form the seabed. To assess the role that seagrass may have in trapping and removing marine plastic, Anna Sanchez-Vidal and colleagues measured the amount of plastic debris collected from seagrass litter ...
Advancements in energy technologies, healthcare, semiconductors and food production all have one thing in common: they rely on developing new materials--new combinations of atoms--that have specific properties enabling them to perform a needed function. In the not-too-distant past, the only way to know what properties a material had was by performing experimental measurements or using very expensive computations.
More recently, scientists have been using machine learning algorithms to rapidly predict the properties that certain arrangements of atoms would have. The challenge with this approach is it requires a lot of highly accurate data to train the model, which often does not exist.
By combining large ...
Retinal cells derived from adult human eye stem cells survived when transplanted into the eyes of monkeys, an important early step in the validation of this approach for treating blindness, according to a study by Liu, et al recently published in Stem Cell Reports. The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer of pigmented cells in the retina, is essential for sustaining normal vision. Blindness due to RPE dysfunction, such as macular degeneration, affects about 200 million people worldwide.
To restore this population of cells, researchers extracted retinal stem cells from donated cadaver adult eyes, grew them into RPE cells and transplanted them into the eyes of monkeys. ...
Retinal cells derived from a cadaver human eye survived when transplanted into the eyes of primate models, an important advance in the development of cell therapy to treat blindness, according to a study published on January 14 in Stem Cell Reports.
The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer of pigmented cells in the retina, functions as a barrier and regulator in the eye to maintain normal vision. RPE dysfunction can lead to eye disorders including macular degeneration and can cause blindness, which affects about 200 million people worldwide.
To restore this population of cells, ...
