Seattle and King County saw a record number of visitors during 2018 – an estimated 40.9 million.
Visit Seattle, the nonprofit marketing organization for the city and broader King County, published the preliminary numbers from their 2018 annual report on March 4.
The number of visitors to the city and county was up 2.5 percent from 2017. Overnight visitors to the area increased by 2.3 percent. Visitors spent $7.8 billion in the area and paid $806 million in local and state taxes, both of which were nearly six percent increases from the year before.
Tourism related jobs increased by 3.1 percent in Seattle and King County to accommodate the millions of visitors to the Emerald City last year. There were an estimated 78,000 tourism related jobs in the Seattle area.
Seven new hotels opened in 2018, which created 2,248 new hotel rooms. Included in that group is the Hyatt Regency Seattle which is the largest hotel in the Pacific Northwest.
More business groups came to Seattle and drove up the demand for meeting space. There were 50 national conventions that came to the Washington State Convention Center during 2018.
For example, December is usually a hard month for the local hospitality industry because there’s less business travel, but the Linux Foundation’s KubeCon, a tech conference, booked the convention center and filled many hotel rooms. The meeting venue started its expansion with the new Summit building August 2018 to anticipate further growth.
The final data will be released in May.