You’re forgiven if you’ve hissed swear words trying to make your way around the island these days. What with the repaving of Eaton Street, which has pushed traffic into usually quiet neighborhoods, and the colliding of Spring Break and the height of the 2025 season, we’ve got a lot of lost souls checking their GPS and a lot of locals dashing for the back roads.

Add in the daily school pickups and deliveries, the GFS and Sysco trucks disgorging jalapeno poppers, fuel trucks, the USPS, UPS and Fed Ex, the firetrucks and the EMTs, and, well, you get the picture.

March-into-April wears us down, doesn’t it? We’re counting the days until Easter, or maybe Mother’s Day if we stretch things out a few weeks. Every year we think it’s the worst, most congested tourist season ever and then we forget until next year when we rinse and repeat, once again aghast at bumper-to-bumper slowdowns, long lines and sisters-in-law in the grocery aisles discussing the challenge of dietary restrictions when provisioning a vacation rental. My friend rates traffic by counting how many green lights it takes to get through the Simonton-Truman intersection what with folks turning left. A “six-greens” day — so far — is the worst.

I know. I know. Visitors make cash registers ring and credit cards ping, assuming Comcast’s internet is actually working and one doesn’t have to revert to cash or a “closed” sign on the door. I’m not among the “hate the tourists” contingent for two reasons: They fuel our economy and most of them are delighted to be here.

That said, like you, I spend inordinate time making my way around the island. For the past couple weeks I’ve passed the time doing things like counting the cars with a green Key West parking sticker (a sure sign of a local), tallying vacant street parking, checking the lines at popular restaurants and attractions and watching the walking three rivers of visitors along Duval, Simonton and Whitehead.

All that traffic jam “research” brought me to this observation: I’m pretty sure, when the final tallies are made for the 2025 winter season, this won’t have been a banner year. The irrational exuberance of the Covid years, when Key West was darn near the only sun-and-sand tropical destination open, done crashed and burned.

Lessons learned from the 2025 season

Sign No. 1: The Key West real estate market, which showed signs of cracking in early January, can gently be described as “interesting.” You’re not wrong if you’ve noticed the proliferation of for-sale signs in neighborhoods. Though the stats vary a bit depending on who’s doing the counting, there were about 550 island homes for sale in February, an increase of about 14 percent over January.

Forty-eight homes were listed as sold or pending in February, and 83 percent of the ones sold were below listing price. The median sales price was $1.1 million. A house down the street from me was listed for $2,175,000 in January 2024. It sold this February for $1,799,000. It sold in 2019 for $450,000 and that new owner did a $440,000 renovation.

Sign No. 2: You can find on-street parking, even on the blocks with “reserved for locals” spaces. OK, so it’s not easy and you’re not guaranteed a spot in front of your house, but compared to the past three or four years? Yeah, there’s parking to be had. Still, we’ve got too many vehicles vying for free parking and I’d giddily forgo the battalions of unsteady tourists on bikes, scooters, golf carts and assorted e-transports clogging the streets.

Sign No. 3: There are hotel rooms and vacation rentals to be booked, even at the last minute. Put on your thinking cap and you’ll remember the hunger games of the early 2020s when hotels and vacation rentals were at capacity and nightly stays could top $1,500. I could book a room for tonight at the Casa Marina for $436. That wouldn’t have been possible in 2021.

Tourist occupancy rates, which are tougher for me to track through online sources, appear to trend down beginning in 2023 and into 2024. My guess is when the final 2025 numbers are in, we’ll see measurably lower totals. While Key West remains one of Florida’s most popular tourist destinations and there’s no such thing as budget-friendly rates, it’s probably safe for me to say we have way more rooms than we have visitors to fill them.

It’ll be interesting to see if national events make our Canadian, European and Asian visitors think twice before booking a Key West vacation. There are already indications the 2025 and 2026 seasons could be challenging. Consider this one paragraph wrap-up, as reported in a recent story from “The Conversation”:

“According to a March poll by Canadian market researcher Leger, 36% of Canadians who had planned trips to the United States had already cancelled them. According to data from the aviation analytics company OAG, passenger bookings on Canada to US routes are down by over 70% compared to the same period last year. This comes after the U.S. Travel Association warned that even a 10% reduction in Canadian inbound travel could result in a US$2.1 billion (£1.6 billion) loss in spending, putting 140,000 hospitality jobs at risk.“

Sign No. 4: Lines and reservations are (sorta) manageable. The Covid years trained me to call weeks, if not months, ahead if I wanted a reservation at Louie’s or Latitudes or any of the established local-and-visitor-friendly restaurants or attractions. Lines around the block at the Hemingway Home, which were a Covid standard, are significantly shorter these days. If I wanted a 9:15 reservation at Latitudes tonight, I could get one. I could do lunch out there early next week.

Sign No. 5: Locals are talking about the decline. Smart ones, those who figured the Covid boom wasn’t the new normal, adjusted and are planning ahead. They’ll do fine as the economy shifts again. But the ones in it for making a big buck? The outsiders who laid claim to homes as vacation rentals and an income stream? The folks with no connection to the island and no interest in making Key West home? They’re getting out.

I’ll wave farewell the next time I’m researching in a traffic jam.

LEARN MORE

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