South Haven has been seeing fewer visitors in recent years.
Visit South Haven’s Jennifer Sistrunk addressed the city council Monday to give her annual report and reviewed some of the numbers, saying 2025 stats contained a bit of a surprise.
“So right now, we’re sitting at about 1.6 million people that came to South Haven in 2025, but if you also look all the way over to the left, you’ll see that’s the same amount of people that were here in 2020, during the pandemic,” Sistrunk said.
Sistrunk said the drop in visitors hasn’t been massive, but similar drops haven’t been seen with competing communities, like New Buffalo and Holland, which have seen increases in visitors. She noted if the current trend continues for ten years, then South Haven’s yearly visitors will drop to fewer than one million.
“So we’re all sitting at about 1.6, but South Haven has gotten there by downward spiraling visitation. New Buffalo has gotten there by increasing their visitation. And Grand Haven has just kind of held steady.”
A glance at a slide presented by Sistrunk Monday suggested St. Joseph has also been relatively stable.
Sistrunk noted Visit South Haven uses anonymous location data pulled from a service called Placer.ai to keep a handle on travel trends to the area. She also said contrary to popular belief, the majority of South Haven’s visitors are from Michigan, and not Chicago. In fact, about 52% are from Michigan and only 18% are from Illinois.
Sistrunk said Visit South Haven will continue collecting data, developing destinations, and marketing the area to ensure it remains a popular place for people to spend their vacations.
