Hilton Head businesses ‘absolutely hurt’ by Florence evacs. Here’s why recovery may be slow

Businesses on Hilton Head Island are trying to get back to normal after a whirlwind week of evacuation orders, evacuation lifts, staff shortages, supply chain cutoffs and all the chaos leading up to Hurricane Florence before the storm missed the island.

After the initial threat of Florence and recognizing the two previous years’ storms, some businesses shut their doors to allow staff to evacuate and prepare for less-than-ideal business conditions.

However, several restaurant owners reported that the damage was already done on Monday, when Gov. Henry McMaster ordered the mandatory evacuation of Beaufort County and the evacuation lift put the businesses in a tough spot.

Hotels see major drop in occupancy

Summer Yates, a front desk manager the Marriott Hilton Head Resort and Spa, said that the 513-room hotel typically sees 200 check-ins per day on a busy weekend.

On Sunday morning, they saw less than 12.

Yates said most of the cancellations are not due to concerns over weather in Hilton Head like they were earlier this week.

“It’s not up to the weather here, it’s about the weather where they’re coming from,” Yates said.

Guests coming from North Carolina may have been evacuated, and some airlines have canceled flights to South Carolina due to the storm.

Yates said the Marriott has been a safe haven for guests who were locked out of their condos or rental properties and found that offices were closed and unable to help. The Marriott’s occupancy rate has been hovering around 14 percent in the past few days, but Yates said “a lot of the neighboring hotels were closed on and off,” and “guests had nowhere to go.”

Large resorts on the island such as the Omni Hilton Head Oceanfront Resort and the Inn at Harbour Town in Sea Pines are reopening on Monday to check in guests who kept their reservations. Both hotels closed last week in anticipation of Hurricane Florence, according to front desk staff.

Disney’s Hilton Head Island Resort, which originally closed on Monday, Sept. 10, announced to guests that it will remain closed through Wednesday, Sept. 19.

Lack of tourists hit restaurants hard

Restaurants on Hilton Head, who depend heavily on tourists even after Labor Day, reported slow business throughout the week after many hotels evacuated their guests.

Jane Bistro & Bar, located in Shelter Cove, stayed open for the entire week, and general manager Tiffany Ebey said the restaurant saw between “25 and 30 percent” of its normal guests this week.

“We were one of the only restaurants open Thursday and Friday,” Ebey said. “But it was still slow.”

Stephanie Mellott, a manager at the Pope Avenue location of New York City Pizza, said on Sunday that the entire week was slow and that staff there is hoping for a busy night as people who evacuated start to return to the island.

Alan Wolf, the director of operations for SERG Restaurant Group, said the guests who visited SERG restaurants were “probably 60 percent locals and 40 percent tourists,” which he said is pretty typical after Labor Day weekend.

However, Saturday was the slowest day of the week for most SERG restaurants, which Wolf said was because most people expected to see results of Florence hit the area that day. Instead, the island will see less than an inch of rain through the weekend and into Monday.

Wolf said that although restaurants saw a fair amount of locals riding out the storm, “we’re going to be dependent on how quickly the hotels fill back up.”

Evacuation confusion creates staffing nightmare

The confusion over evacuations took its toll on staffing levels on an island that already suffers from a workforce shortage. Abby Wirth, a spokesperson for Coastal Restaurants and Bars, said restaurants had a hard time finding staff to work this week because many had evacuated before the order was lifted on Tuesday.

“We’re definitely low on kitchen staff,” Wirth said. In spite of that, she said a bartender at Aunt Chilada’s reported a full bar this weekend, and it was a crowd of mostly locals.

Hudson’s Seafood House on the Docks closed from Tuesday until Saturday afternoon, and general manager Andrew Carmines said he thinks it turned out to be the right decision, because about 50 percent of the staff chose to evacuate.

“It was mostly kitchen staff that evacuated with their families,” Carmines said of experiencing the same shortage as other restaurants. “We’re already tight on kitchen staff on the island, so you can’t afford to lose those people.”

When asked how lifting the evacuation order impacted business, Wolf said it “absolutely hurt” the normal operations of restaurants, because it caused “tremendous gray area” for SERG staff, and that restaurants struggled with knowing when to open and who to schedule each night.

The SERG group closed four restaurants for varying amounts of time: Poseidon, One Hot Mama’s, Frankie Bones and Guiseppi’s Hilton Head.

Mellott said that New York City Pizza cut “around 80 percent” of the staff and operated on a bare bones schedule with whoever could stay and work in the days that Hurricane Florence threatened the coastline.

Several restaurants opened with limited menus in order to make up for short staffing, according to businesses on the running list of restaurants that were open.

Supply cutoffs add to the mess

Restaurants faced another challenge with Hurricane Florence bearing down on most of the state — a cutoff from seafood distributors on the South Carolina coast that send products to Hilton Head restaurants.

Wolf said that SERG restaurants canceled all orders on Tuesday, when the evacuation order would have gone into effect. This meant that once the order was lifted and restaurants reopened, kitchen staff had no fresh product from the previous day.

“We experienced some food loss,” Wolf said about product that had to be thrown away because it was spoiled.

He said that SERG also had to adjust seafood supplies, which typically come from all around the Southeast coast. The restaurant group canceled orders from Carolina distributors and opted to lean on orders in unaffected areas like Atlanta and northern Florida.

Meanwhile, New York City Pizza used up all prepared food and then began to cross menu items off the list.

“We didn’t try to order anything,” Mellott said of stopping communications with distributors.

Jane Bistro & Bar ran out of supplies too, according to Ebey, especially seafood that comes from Charleston. Losing those ingredients forced the restaurant to take things off the menu even while it stayed open.

“We worked with what we had,” Ebey said.

Back to normal?

As the hospitality industry aims to return to normal, an uptick in guests will have to trickle down from hotels and rentals to restaurants and retail.

Back at the Marriott, Yates said the storm has already affected reservations going into next week.

The hotel was “due to have 200 arrivals on Saturday and only 10 came” yesterday. This means the hotel will feel much more empty in the coming days, and there will be less guests patronizing local businesses as well.

“There was a period of seven hours this weekend where I didn’t see a guest,” Yates said. However, she said she hopes the hotel will return to normal occupancy next weekend.

This story was originally published September 16, 2018 at 6:22 PM.