New York City Expects Strong Holiday Sales

The holidays were happy for New York City last year and the city is expecting a repeat performance in 2024.

On Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams released a report, “Festive Spending: The Impact of the Holiday Season on NYC Retail,” that showed that in 2023, the city attracted up to 4.4 million daily visitors that spent more than $500 million and led to the creation of 14,000 jobs.

These robust numbers reveal that New York has fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, the mayor’s office said.

“New York City isn’t just coming back — we’re back, and we’re better than ever,” Adams said. “We’re hitting jobs record after jobs record, we’ve brought our economy back from its COVID lows to hit new highs, and we’re continuing to put money back into working-class New Yorkers’ pockets to make this city more affordable. No time is that more true than the holidays — and we can’t wait to welcome the millions of people from around the world who come to our shopping districts this time of year. They’re supporting thousands of jobs and businesses, and injecting half a billion dollars into our local economy. So, when you’re shopping this holiday season, remember — shop local, shop small and, most of all, spend money in New York City.”

Maria Torres-Springer, first deputy mayor, added that the dollars the city expects to be spent this holiday season will help businesses “enter 2025 on an economic upswing.”

The holiday season is the busiest for New York with 3.2 million daily visitors coming to the city during Black Friday and weekends in December last year, a 14 percent increase from average daily visits the remainder of the year. The numbers peaked last year on the weekend before Christmas when 4.4 million people were in town.

Among the most popular retail hubs were Fifth Avenue, Bryant Park, Times Square and SoHo in Manhattan, as well as downtown Flushing in Queens and the MetroTech area in Brooklyn. In Midtown, which the city defined as Times Square, Bryant Park and Fifth Avenue, 70 percent of visitors during the holiday season came from outside the city, 9 percent higher than on an average weekend the rest of the year.

“As the holiday season continues across the five boroughs, it’s clear that the tourism sector is not only back — it’s thriving,” said Nancy Mammana, the city’s Tourism + Conventions interim chief executive officer and chief marketing officer. “With approximately 7.5 million travelers expected to visit New York City between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, we’re seeing the energy of our recovery reflected in foot traffic, job creation and economic impact.”

Julie Stein, executive director of the Union Square Partnership, said visits to that neighborhood have more than doubled since January 2020 and last year, sales between Thanksgiving and New Year’s accounted for 14 percent of the total for the year, a 68 percent increase from the prior year. And Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance, said foot traffic in that area was up nearly 9 percent in October and 20 percent in November over last year and the neighborhood is “looking forward to a very strong December.”

The city obtained its data on visitation and foot traffic from Placer.ai, and its spending trends based on the Mastercard consumer spending index. The economic impact was estimated by using figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.