Rebuilding the Tower of Babel
The outlook for the lodging market in Santa Barbara is fairly sunny. As a whole, the Santa Barbara–Santa Maria area finished 2001 at 68.2% occupancy, only 2.2 percentage points down from its 70.4% occupancy finish in 2000.
In 2001, the Monterey market area felt the effects and aftershocks of many of the same events that caused occupancies to plummet in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.