In early March 2020, a swiftly changing situation with a new virus spreading around the world led to the Anaheim Convention Center’s first big event cancelation: the Natural Products Expo West.

This week, just over two years later, the expo – featuring an array of organic, chemical-free, biodegradable and otherwise planet- and health-conscious goods and services – is back, and the crowd at the convention center feels like something close to pre-pandemic normal.

Vendors and visitors are “so excited to be back, it’s people they haven’t seen face to face in two years,” said Jay Burress, CEO of Visit Anaheim. “It’s just almost a festival-type atmosphere.”

It’s great news for the city’s tourism bureau, which is funded by room taxes charged to hotel guests, and it’s even better for the city, which borrowed about $130 million to cover a budget hole left by the pandemic-forced closure of Disneyland, canceled sports, concerts and business meetings, and vanishing tourists.

Since March 2020, nearly 100 convention center bookings have been canceled; they would have attracted about 1.6 million people to the city and generated economic impact of $2.8 billion, according to information from Visit Anaheim.

Although some of those events were rebooked for future dates, the pandemic-driven economic shutdown was devastating for Visit Anaheim, which Burress said reduced its staff from 71 employees to 31, and for the city, where spokesman Mike Lyster said unemployment peaked in May 2020 at 17.4% (about 28,800 people) – five percentage points higher than during the Great Recession.

When the Natural Products event was called off in 2020, “we knew that was the first domino,” Lyster said; it was followed by the shuttering of the Honda Center, Angel Stadium, the city-owned convention center and Disneyland.

“We thought it would be for two weeks, and two weeks became 13 months,” he said.

This week’s expo, which officially kicked off Thursday, isn’t the first event to return to the convention center, but it is the biggest so far, and it’s a sign of more to come.

Among the current 37 convention center bookings for 2022 are WonderCon, the Star Wars Celebration, D23 (for Disney fans) and the National Association of Music Merchants, or NAMM, trade show. They’re projected to draw 585,000 visitors, which will translate to a projected 370,000 hotel room nights and more than $1 billion pumped into the local economy (including peripheral spending at restaurants and shops).

Jasmin Guleria, marketing director for plant-based food producer LikeMeat, said her New York-based company has hardly done any business travel or in-person meetings for the past couple years.

“I think everyone’s just really happy to have some level of normalcy again,” she said. “It’s good to be back in the convention center. It’s very busy.”

Lyster said the expo’s 3,000 vendors and 57,000 attendees are projected to generate about $2 million for the city just from hotel stays, and overall, tourism revenues have been beating forecasts for the year.

Of the $130 million the city borrowed about a year ago, when the pandemic was still laying waste to tourism, Anaheim has only had to spend about $34 million, Lyster said, so city leaders are discussing putting some of the rest toward community improvements and refilling emergency reserves. (The long-term borrowing is structured so it can’t be paid back this early, he said.)

Burress said Visit Anaheim’s staff has climbed back up to about 42 people and may continue to grow, although it may never be as large as it was before COVID-19. And there’s still some cash left from a tranche of about $6.5 million the City Council gave the tourism bureau to keep it afloat in 2020, but Burress said it’s now all been committed to programs marketing the city as a place for business and pleasure trips.

Some industry experts predict international tourism and large group travel won’t fully return until 2024, but this week’s Natural Products convention (with vendors from around the world and as close as Orange County) appears to be a good start.

Jesse Merrill, CEO and co-founder of Irvine-based Good Culture, which makes a range of preservative-free cottage cheeses, said he’s seen most of the industry’s big names, as well as the launch of new brands at the Anaheim event. He’s personally seen the mix of virtual versus in-person meetings go from about 90% online to 50/50.

“This is the first time a lot of us have had the opportunity to be in the same place since the pandemic hit,” Merrill said. “Nothing replaces the human connection.”