Tourists drawn to Seattle waterfront for Memorial Day weekend

The Seattle waterfront is proving a big draw for tourists from far and near!

Tourists appear to be shaking off the pandemic this Memorial Day weekend.

And, if the Seattle waterfront is any indication, many of them decided to spend at last part of this holiday weekend in our area.

The Mariners are in town. Three cruise ships are in town, too, before heading to Alaska.

And maybe it’s just pandemic fatigue.

Whatever it is, a lot of people have made their way to the Seattle waterfront.

The numbers seemed to be turning upward right before our eyes. The Seattle Waterfront is once again a destination for tourists even on this dreary start to the Memorial Day weekend.

“It’s amazing,” said Tushar Sharma, who lived in Seattle before moving to Vancouver, British Columbia. “Like my parents are visiting for the first time, so, it’s being a tour guide for them. So, it feels amazing.”

According to AAA, Seattle is the number two destination behind Orlando, Florida, for Memorial Day travel.

That doesn’t surprise Dennis Case, visiting from Lacey.

“Really, one, two, three giant cruise ships in the harbor,” said Case. “How many passengers each?  Probably four, five thousand people, easy.”

And, indeed, there were tourists aplenty in Seattle just before cruising off to Alaska.

Fourteen-year-old Estafania Gonzalez came with her family from Miami.

“Yes, I am very happy,” she said about their cruise to the Last Frontier. She stood in the embrace of her father, Hernan, a Seattle cap gracing her head, souvenir bags in her hand.

There is another big draw to Emerald City, too.

“We came for the Mariner game,” said Lisa Sanchez of Moses Lake. “So, yeah, we took some advantage of having extra time and came out to the pier. We just came out of soaring over Washington.”

According to the Waterfront Historic District, the best year here for those whose livelihoods depend on how many show up was in 2017. That year more than 6.4 million people visited the waterfront.

“With corona(virus), that fell to 1.2 million in 2020,” said Bob Donegan, Ivar’s CEO and a representative of the Waterfront Historic District. “And it tripled last year to 3.6 million. And with the cruise ships and people being more comfortable, we think we’ll see 5 million unique visitors on the waterfront this summer. So that’s why I’m smiling more broadly.”

If this keeps up, his smile will likely get even bigger.

In fact, Donegan says Saturday was their busiest day since March 2020, when the pandemic began.

And the weekend is just getting started.

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