If you won a trip to New Orleans as a motivational award or promotional prize, or if you had a meeting or convention scheduled for the area, it’s going to be quite a while before the Crescent City is fully open for business.
The popular areas associated with tourism— French Quarter, Warehouse District, Garden District and Central Business District— the least amount of damage when Hurricane Katrina battered the area on Aug. 29 and most areas now have power, Kathleen Ratcliffe of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau said yesterday.
As for the hotels, most sustained no significant damage, with the exception of the Hyatt. Many hotels are housing the 50,000 relief workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), insurance companies, banks and other organizations that arrived in the area. The workers are housed in some 20,000 hotel rooms for at least 90 days and Ratcliffe said that’s helping to move the remediation of the hotels forward.
“That’s really going to assist us in getting the facilities up and running; as FEMA arrives at a hotel, they make sure it’s safe for their workers,” Ratcliffe said.
Most area hotels are expected to remain closed to the public until at least Dec. 1.
She said restaurants are beginning to reopen, including about six now open in the French Quarter and another six or so expected to open there by the end of next week.
“The restaurant community will come back rather quickly,” she said.
One half of the convention center, the site where thousands of flood victims lived in squalid conditions for days before help arrived, is the headquarters for FEMA until at least Dec. 1. The convention center, which has 1.1 million square feet of exhibit space, is not expected to reopen until March 31, 2006.
About 32 conventions citywide were cancelled this fall and through the first quarter of 2006, Ratcliffe said. Some events were rescheduled, but others, like the annual AARP convention, had to be cancelled because of the close proximity of the storm to its convention.
Most of the major tourist attractions had no significant damage including museums, Jackson Square and the Audubon Zoo.
“We’re feeling very positive about the recovery of the tourism industry in New Orleans,” Ratcliffe said.
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