Travelers have booked fewer hotel rooms in downtown Miami, and leisure airfares to the greater Miami area have inched down in the weeks since the Zika virus was detected there, data reviewed by Reuters shows.Hotels sold 2.9 percent fewer rooms in Miami's central business district and northern neighborhoods during the first three weeks of August than they did a year earlier in the same period, according to hotel data and analytics firm STR.
That area includes the Wynwood arts district where on July 29 Florida officials said they confirmed cases of people who contracted the virus, marking the first transmissions by mosquitoes in the continental United States.
The decline in hotel bookings may be an early indication of the virus's effect on Miami's robust tourism industry, which had an economic impact of $24.4 billion in 2015, according to the Greater Miami Convention and Visitor Bureau.