Seven years of record-high L.A. County tourism numbers are spreading some gold dust to the city of Beverly Hills, according to a new report from the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.
The approximately six-square-mile municipality welcomed 7.4 million visitors in the 2016 fiscal year, a 23 percent increase over the prior year, the biannual report released last month said.
“L.A. is very hot right now,” said Julie Wagner, chief executive of the bureau. “Downtown is buzzing; there are amazing restaurants. It’s a really good time to be a part of all that.”
Beverly Hills’ total tourism dollars – the transient occupancy tax on hotel revenue plus the tourist-generated sales tax – brought $57 million to the municipality in 2016, the report said. Visitors brought $2.8 billion in direct and indirect impact to the area.
Most of that revenue is from its 14 percent hotel tax foisted on its 17 hospitality businesses, an amount that has swelled 60 percent over the past decade, according to the Bureau’s report.
The city of Beverly Hills expects the hotel tax alone will bring in more than $44.1 million in the current fiscal year, or a 1-plus percent increase from the $43.5 million from the prior year.
Wagner thinks the estimated tax revenue might be conservative.
“Our hotels have been doing very well, so we’re hoping to beat the projections,” she said.
That includes its newest hotel, the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, which opened 170 rooms last year.
The city of Los Angeles, for comparison, expected to take in $241 million in hotel taxes for its 2016-2017 budget.
Class Action
A judge granted class action status earlier this month to a lawsuit filed in 2015 that alleges some of L.A. County’s most celebrated restaurants conspired to fix their prices by including a 3 percent health care surcharge on their sales.
Plaintiff Margaret Imhoff said in the lawsuit filed in L.A. County Superior Court that the restaurants colluded to add the charge in violation of California’s antitrust act.
Josh Loeb, who owns several of the 17 restaurants named in the suit, told the Business Journal in 2016 that the charge was supposed to increase transparency about the restaurants costs, which have increased with the rising minimum wage and Affordable Care Act.
“We wanted to give a little bit of power back to the customer,” he said. “We wanted customers to know that we were paying for employee health care and what that cost is.”
Imhoff filed the lawsuit after dining at Loeb’s Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica. Some of the other restaurants named in the suit include Loeb’s Huckleberry and Milo & Olive; star chef Suzanne Goin’s A.O.C., the Hungry Cat and Lucques; and Jon Shook’s and Vinny Dotolo’s Animal, Son of a Gun and Trois Mec.
Customers who dined at one of the named restaurants between Sept. 1, 2014 and Jan. 9, 2018 and have a receipt showing a health care surcharge can apply to join the case through Feb. 20.
Slowed Growth
December was a pretty good month for new car sales – and decidedly better than results for the full year – according to vehicle registration data released Jan. 26 by the Greater Los Angeles New Car Dealers Association and compiled by Auto Outlook Inc.
The total number of new vehicles registered fell only 1.5 percent to more than 41,000 during December.
The L.A. market saw a 4.7 percent drop for all of 2017, when new vehicle registrations fell to just over 512,000, according to the report.
Car dealerships also saw a 1.8 percent decrease nationally, to 17.2 million new vehicles last year. That ended a hot streak that started with the recovery from the Great Recession.
Last year was the first slowdown after a six-year streak of gains for L.A. County dealerships that brought a cumulative 112-percent hike in annual sales.
The report predicted that new car sales would continue to soften again this year but that a relatively healthy economy and excitement over new models would help mitigate the drop in sales over the next few years.
Staff reporter Caroline Anderson can be reached at [email protected].