PSBJ: Overlook Walk’s popularity sends visitor foot traffic soaring

This story was originally published by the Puget Sound Business Journal on Oct. 16, 2024.

By Marc Stiles – Senior Reporter, Puget Sound Business Journal

It was a safe bet that Overlook Walk would draw hordes of people. On Tuesday, the Downtown Seattle Association released the early numbers.

Nearly 50,000 people visited during the first seven days after the Oct. 4 opening of Overlook Walk, which bridges the cliff-like space between Pike Place Market the new Waterfront Park. That’s a 142% increase for the area over 2019’s weekly average, according to DSA, which uses geolocation data from Placer.ai.

DSA President and CEO Jon Scholes called Overlook Walk “a game-changer for downtown and the pedestrian experience between Pike Place Market and the waterfront.”

DSA released other data points that indicate some metrics, such as hotel rooms sold and overall visitors, matched September 2019 numbers. But the number of Seattleites coming downtown to visit continued to lag, as did the average number of weekday workers.

From June through September the Pike-Pine corridor saw 2 million local visitors, or people living within 10 miles of downtown. While that was 6% over the same period in 2023, it was only 70% of 2019’s summer local visitor foot traffic. (The corridor is the area between First and Ninth avenues, from Stewart to Union streets.)

In September, downtown saw 2.7 million unique visitors, or 98% of September 2019’s numbers. Around 383,000 downtown hotel rooms were sold, equal to 2019’s numbers.

September capped a strong summer tourist season, with hotels selling nearly 1.6 million rooms over four months. That was more than both 2023 and even 2019, according to DSA, which uses data from Visit Seattle and STR, which provides market data on the hotel industry worldwide.

It was the seventh consecutive month downtown has averaged more than 88,000 daily workers.