Good summer for Rehoboth Beach

It was a good summer for Rehoboth Beach's economy -- not a great one, but a good one nonetheless.

According to Carol Everhart, head of the Rehoboth Beach-Dewey Beach Chamber of Commerce, the summer went well for Rehoboth-area businesses.

Everhart said that overall visitation and traffic counts were strong.

She said that the owner of Funland has told her that the amusement park ended slightly up for the season -- which she uses as a jumping-off point to analyze the season.

She said there was a drop-off in midweek business during July. According to her, extended weekends, where tourists stayed Friday through Monday were very strong, especially around the holidays.

"The weekends just keep getting stronger," Everhart said. She said it is the July and August mid-week visitation that is dropping off.

Tony Gouvas, owner of Louie's Pizza on Rehoboth Avenue, said he was not positive yet as to how the year turned out financially -- as he has not yet done all the accounting.

Gouvas said that based on the traffic through his restaurant, he had a good year, though not one for the record books.

While he believes the summer was pretty solid, he said he thinks this past Labor Day weekend was very strong.

"That was probably the best we had in years," Gouvas said of this past Labor Day.

Everhart said that some downtown businesses were also reporting that their individual days were winding down earlier.

She attributes this to more house and condominium rentals spreading out to Route 1 and beyond.

Families are spending their days on the beach, but when they leave downtown in the afternoon to get cleaned up for dinner, many stay on Route 1 and patronize restaurants along the highway.

Everhart thinks the further a visitor is staying from the beach area, the less likely he or she is going to come back into downtown after being there all day.

Everhart said she received many complaints in July and early August when the Delaware Department of Transportation closed lanes on Route 1. She said some of the complaints were called in by visitors still in their vehicles.

She that once the Delaware Department of Transportation made changes to some traffic patterns created by the construction, the complaints died down.

The Route 1 construction did not seem to cause issues for the Tanger Outlet Centers located on the busy highway.

Rehoboth Beach Tanger Outlets general manager Amy Norgate said the three centers she oversees are up six percent in sales for the year.

The centers have traffic counters to track the number of vehicles coming in and out of each center. According to her, all three centers showed overall increases in traffic over June, July and August.

The highest traffic increases were at the Midway Tanger Outlet Center, the northernmost of the three centers and the one sitting in the middle of the Route 1 construction.

Norgate did attribute some of the outlets' success to new stores like Abercrombie and Fitch, Hollister and American Eagle Outfitters.

According to Craig Porter, an assistant manager at the Guess store in the Seaside Tanger Outlet Center, his store did not have as strong a summer as it usually has.

"It hasn't been our best year," Porter said of his store's business this summer. He said he was not sure if the Route 1 construction played a part in his store's lackluster sales season.

According to him, weather is a big factor for outlet stores' summer business -- with rainy days flooding the stores with customers.

"And we had a really dry summer," Porter said of the possible cause of the Guess store's summer slump.

source: delmarvanow.com