Napa Valley “like a ghost town” this summer

Harvest season is officially underway but soaring hotel costs and reservation-only tastings are keeping tourists away from California’s wine country.

In contrast to last year’s bumper crop of tourists, Napa Valley has been relatively empty this summer, with hotels half full and a particular dearth of international travellers.

A number of factors are contributing to the slowdown, not least the fact that the average hotel room in Napa is now US$455 per night, up from US$349 per night in 2021.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that in Yountville, there was an “unheard of low occupancy rate of 56% in June compared to pre-pandemic occupcancy level of 72%”.

Add to this a hangover from Covid, which means that many wineries are still operating under reservation-only appointments for tastings, and it’s easy to see why footfall has slowed. The measures, introduced to comply with self-distancing regulations during the pandemic, have largely stayed in place, ruling out walk-ins. According to a recent Sonoma Wine Tasting Report, 85% of Sonoma County tasting rooms are still by appointment only.

In July, “Napa was a ghost town,” Katie Hamilton Shaffer, owner of wine collective Feast it Forward, told the Chronicle.

“We thought we’d be slammed on weekends and that’s not been the case. We were looking at each other weekend after weekend, like ‘What’s going on? When is it going to start picking up?’”

Businesses that rely on Napa’s wine tourism trade, including restaurants, hotels and concierge services, say they desperately need things to bounce back ahead of a traditionally slow winter.

“It’s been a different season than any of us expected. We were all planning that Roaring Twenties thing to happen,” said Alison Smith-Story, co-owner of Smith Story Wine Cellars in Healdsburg.

Meanwhile, the UK saw a record number of Google searches for “vineyard stays” during July 2022. Searches for breaks spent on English vineyards leapt by 110%.

In June, Airbnb launched a new “Vineyard” category featuring 120,000 stays on working vineyards around the world, in response to analysis which showed that more people than ever were looking for vineyard stays.