Scott Kurtz and his wife, Ellen Walsh, enjoy a perfect beach day in Middletown yesterday. The Oregon couple is spending the summer in the Newport area.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

MIDDLETOWN — Diane Miklasiewicz wanted Newport’s historic sites on a budget.

So when she and her husband, Gregory, planned their summer vacation, she searched the Internet and found a $100-per-night room just 3½ miles from downtown Newport, at the Travel Lodge on West Main Road in Middletown.

“It’s cheaper than Florida,” said Miklasiewicz, 57, of Springfield, Mass.

It’s also cheaper than Newport.

The average hotel room in downtown Newport in June was $263 a night — compared with $129 a night in Middletown, according to data from Smith Travel Research, a national firm.

In these hard economic times, when high fuel and food prices are prompting many Americans to scale back their vacation spending, a quiet competition is under way between these neighboring seaside communities on Aquidneck Island for an increasingly scarce commodity: U.S. tourist dollars.

And so far, it appears that Middletown is winning.

Hotel room revenues in Middletown during April, May and June climbed 8.6 percent, to $13.76 million, from the same period last year, according to data from Smith Travel Research. By contrast, Newport’s hotel revenues during the same period declined 10 percent from a year earlier.

“Newport historically has been a premium price destination,” said Evan Smith, president and chief executive officer of the Newport City Convention & Visitors Bureau. “Travelers today are really price shopping.”

Across the country, hotels reported that occupancy rates through the middle of this year were down 2.6 percent, to 61.4 percent, according to Smith Travel Research’s Lodging Review.

The outlook for U.S. travel and tourism is “pretty stagnant,” said Jennifer Fuller, a principal at the economic forecasting firm Global Insight, adding that travel from state to state can vary widely.

Rhode Island has historically drawn the large majority of its tourists from around the Northeast, within a few hours drive. That’s a plus for travelers such as the Springfield, Mass., couple who ditched their annual Florida vacation in favor of a New England trip. But it also means that travel here is affected by higher gas prices.

Roughly 50,000 fewer motorists crossed the Newport bridge from January through June, or a decrease of 1 percent from the same period last year, according to the Newport City Convention & Visitors Bureau.

To lure budget-conscious travelers, hotels and other lodgings in Middletown reduced their average room rates in June by $21.08 from June of last year. Middletown’s competitive rates, no doubt, helped boost its June occupancy rate to 76.4 percent — up from 73 percent last June, and the highest June rate since 2005, according to Smith Travel.

Meanwhile, Newport lodgers cut their average room rate by $7.47 in June, but occupancy rates still declined to 73.7 percent — down from 82.7 percent in June of last year, according to Smith Travel.

Restaurants also are feeling the pinch. Meal-tax revenues in May were down nearly 8 percent from May of last year, according to the Newport Visitors Bureau. (The June data is expected to be released by the state next week.)

Once again, tourists appear to be favoring the less pricey eateries. Last Thursday morning, the IHOP on West Main Road in Middletown was doing a brisk business, with customers waiting for seats.

“Sales are the same” this year, said the restaurant’s manager, Amy Butler. “We haven’t noticed a decrease.”

The only noticeable difference, she said, is customers’ tips. Her servers report that their tips have dropped from the usual 20 to 25 percent down to 15 or 20 percent.

Across from Easton’s Beach, customers lined up at the take-out window at Flo’s Clam Shack in Middletown, where the most expensive item on the board is a bottle of Moet and two “gourmet dogs” for $50. Of the 20 cars in the parking lot, 12 had license plates from Northeast states.

That is not to say, however, that all tourism is local — far from it. Among the diners at the IHOP was a couple from London and their two young children. Their destination choice was heavily influenced by the good exchange rate and the lower price of everything, from clothes to gasoline, said Carlo Malka, 49.

Their Ford Explorer rental car may guzzle a lot of gas by American standards, but to Brits it’s still “cheap.” In London, Malka said, the price of gasoline is now running the equivalent of about $10 per gallon.

“We’re doing a huge amount of shopping,” he added. The price for his family of four’s New England vacation, he said, was expected to run about $10,000.

The price of gasoline also did not deter Scott Kurtz and his wife, Ellen Walsh, from hitting the road for an extended vacation.

Kurtz, 55, who owns a homebuilding company in Oregon, decided to close up the business until the housing market improves and, literally, hit the road.

He and his wife have already driven 3,000 miles and spent about $750 to drive cross-country in their four-wheel-drive diesel-fueled Jeep. They’ve visited the Grand Tetons and Mount Rushmore, among other high points. They camp in an Italian-made camper tent that is fitted to the roof of their Jeep.

They’ve rented their house in Oregon for the next two years and plan to keep traveling.

“I don’t know what it is about people who think they have to go halfway around the world to find something exotic,” Kurtz said while visiting Second Beach in Middletown recently. “You really don’t need to go that far.”

larditi@projo.com