This week was the last week of work for about 30 employees of one of Key West’s most iconic tourist attractions.
Owners of the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum were forced to lay off most of their staff, effective Thursday, Aug. 27, given the current coronavirus situation and with the potential future of tourism resting on the outcome of the cruise ship referendums on the Key West ballot.
The museum remains open seven days a week, but owner Mike Morawski said he’s “having to reimagine my business plan” while also helping his employees find work elsewhere.
“We currently have two-thirds fewer visitors than usual, but have 15% more employees in order to ensure the public’s and the staff’s health and safety in the COVID pandemic,” said Morawski, whose great-aunt, Bernice Dickson, bought the stately Whitehead Street mansion from the Hemingway estate and turned it into a museum in 1963. Morawski’s mother inherited the property when Dickson died in 1989. He has owned and operated it since 1994 and his children now work there as well.
“The number of people we have coming through in a whole day now is the number we’d normally do in an hour and a half,” said Morawski, who said the decision to lay off his staff devastated him. “These people have been here 10, 15, 25 years. This is a labor-intensive business, with tour guides, maintenance crews, landscapers, special event planners and retail workers.”
A line of camera-toting tourists typically stretches daily down the 900 block of Whitehead Street, waiting for their guided tour of the famous writer’s studio, the island’s first swimming pool and the dozens of six-toed cats that call the place home.
Hemingway lived and wrote in the home from 1931 to 1941, when he moved to Cuba.
But the pandemic forced Morawski to change and reduce the size of the guided tours.
”You can’t imagine the number of times people tell us we should consider the automated tours with headsets, or holograms or other technology, but in speaking with our customers, 99.9% of their positive visitor experience came from their interaction with our tour guides,” Morawski said. “We’ll eventually look at the technology side of things, but the last thing I want to do is hand our guests a script and have them walk around themselves. My great-aunt’s intention was to provide people with a touch and taste experience of Hemingway, the home and Key West itself.”
‘Reimagining’ Key West comes with a price
The museum historically has derived a third of its income from international visitors, a third from cruise ship tourists and a third from domestic travelers, the only ones currently visiting Key West.
“And only about 50% of the usual domestic travelers are coming right now,” said Morawski, who has long served on the board of the Key West Chamber of Commerce as well as other community service organizations. “We’re a labor-intensive business that operates on high volume of tourists with a lot of employees, and that doesn’t seem to be the type of business model that some people want to ‘reimagine’ for Key West tourism these days
“When people say businesses like this will simply have to readjust their business models, that’s possible, and we could consider making this an exclusive attraction, or just making it a high-end event venue, but what would we be losing if we did that? What will the island be losing?
“When people who want to reimagine Key West and get rid of cruise ships, they say the workers who lose their jobs will just have to go elsewhere, and that just sounds callous.”
Morawski added that the timing of the proposed cruise ship referendums, which would significantly reduce the size and number of cruise ships that can visit Key West “seems really insensitive during these times when so many people are out of work.
“This group wants to basically install a gate at the triangle entering Key West and only invite the people they want to have here,” Morawski said. “This town will just become one big gated community, one big homeowner’s association with rules about who can come and what they can do while they’re here.
“This just seems like a really bad time to be taking jobs away from people and revenue away from businesses and the city,” he said. “The most frustrating thing is they’re not seeing, or even caring about, the real people this reimagined attitude affects.”
