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Tag: colorado tourism

Plains tourism pitch: Head east for peace, quiet and solitude

Getting away from it all has gotten increasingly difficult in Colorado’s high country. 

Heading west, I-70 is prone to traffic snarls, Vail and Breckenridge are the busiest ski resorts in the U.S., and lodging and lift ticket prices are sky-high. 

Then there are the great outdoors. Campgrounds in the mountains are at capacity and some primitive areas have been overrun to the point of closure. Trailhead parking fills up in the early hours. 

Go east, and the number of tourists per acre plummets drastically. An estimated 200,000 people visit Pawnee National Grassland and Comanche National Grassland in Colorado in a given year, which total more than 600,000 acres between them. Meanwhile, the 266,000-acre Rocky Mountain National Park had 4.4 million visitors in 2021. 

Run the numbers, and there are probably about 50 times more tourists per acre in Rocky Mountain National Park than there are in Comanche National Grassland. 

And that’s the crux of the plains tourism pitch: Want peace, quiet, and nobody else around? We’ve got it. 

Carrizo Canyon Lamar Colorado Creek 1600x800

Marilee Johnson, director of the Sterling Tourist Information Center for Logan County in northeastern Colorado, came up with a new tagline on a road trip about four years ago: Free Range Tourism. 

“Our tourism is the opposite of a tourist trap, so to speak,” she says. “You don’t stand in line and there are no traffic jams.

The traffic on the ExploreSterling.com website jumped by 300% in 2020 as lodging tax revenue declined by 6%, a victory in Johnson’s view. “We did fare better than the statewide figures and the national figures,” she says. “When the pandemic hit, that almost worked to our advantage, tourism-wise, because we targeted the Front Range.” 

In 2021, lodging tax receipts jumped by 22%. “People were looking to get outdoors and out in open spaces, so we pushed that in 2020 and continued that last year. Now we are expanding that” says Johnson. 

“We have, of course, a little bit different view on attracting tourists than other places,” she adds. “In Estes Park, they’re trying to figure out ways to manage all those tourists. Here we are, like, ‘Come! Come here!’” 

The strategy: doubling down on digital advertising by expanding to adjacent states and developing content for the TravelStorys app. 

Full,moon,rise,over,prairie, ,pawnee,national,grassland,in

The retired chief of interpretation at Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, Rick Wallner is board president of the Canyons & Plains of Southeast Colorado Regional Heritage Taskforce.  

Wallner says tourism in the area is “recovering and in some cases bouncing back really good,” citing increases in lodging tax revenues in 2022 after down years in 2020 and 2021. “We’re starting to see more people discover this part of Colorado. The Colorado Tourism Office has been really good working with us and pushing this area of Colorado. We’re still looking for visitors, whereas some areas of Colorado are overrun with visitors and just can’t support the visitation they have now. 

Down here, you can go out and have the place to yourself—and really get away from it all,” he adds. “We have places like Picketwire Canyonlands, Picture Canyon and Carrizo Canyon that are really beautiful. People always think of the plains as flat, nothing, but we have some really pretty canyon country down here.” 

Wallner says heritage tourism is another regional draw with Bent’s Old Fort, Sand Creek Massacre, and newly minted Amache national historic sites. In 2021, Canyons & Plains promoted the 200th anniversary of the Santa Fe Trail.  

But some other strategies are undeniably forward-looking: The organization recently commissioned artists to create works depicting local history and landmarks. Canyons & Plains is now promoting the region with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of the artworks. 

“Obviously, the ultimate goal is economic development, economic diversity,” Wallner says. “The southeast part of Colorado isn’t exactly booming economically, and this is a way to improve the economies, to bring in tourism dollars to southeast Colorado, and that’s certainly the pitch we make when we go out to county commissioners or lodging tax boards for support.” 

Tourism Distancing Travel Tourism Report
 Photographer: Ben Lehman, Lehman Images

VistaWorks, a Buena Vista-based destination management and marketing firm, is the agency of record for the Prowers County Lodging Tax Board. The staff spent several days on an immersion trip after finalizing the contract in 2019. 

“What we found about this region is: It’s so peaceful,” says Lindsay Diamond, chief storyteller at VistaWorks. “There are sunflower fields and tall green grasses, and there’s just a peace down there with different energy than a mountain town. It’s slow, you can take a breath, and the sunsets over the prairie are just phenomenal.”

Beyond Prowers County, VistaWorks has also promoted La Junta and other destinations on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. “All of our clients have seen year-to-year growth, so we feel like we’ve been successful,” Diamond says. 

“There is a lot of potential,” she adds. “They’re growing, they know there are more initiatives now to promote tourism and to also share the benefits of tourism with their community. All of that’s happening, and it’s really exciting. The plains are pretty special and shouldn’t be overlooked when compared to the mountains.” 

That said, the pile of money that’s cumulatively gone into branding Colorado as a mountain destination might rival the peaks themselves. It’s not just state and local campaigns, it’s countless beer and SUV ads, scores of Hollywood productions, and general public perception at this point. 

“Colorado has a bad habit of only promoting the mountains. Well, that’s a third of the state,” notes Richard Taylor, co-owner of Sundance-High Plains RV Park and Cabins in Lamar. “We’ve got the high desert on one side, the high plains on the other side, but Colorado pretty much promotes the mountains. I understand, it’s been their moneymaker for years, but we need to diversify a bit.”

Taylor and co-owner Derek Mudd have invested about $200,000 in the park since buying it in 2017. Revenue has increased by an average of 20% every year, with visitors from the Front Range helping drive the uptick. 

“Everybody that’s tired of fighting the I-70 traffic getting to the mountains, they’re starting to think about this,” Taylor says. “They want to get away for the weekend, but they don’t want to go to Breckenridge and spend $300 a night.” 

That said, Taylor sees room for improvement. “I think better marketing would be great,” he says. “I don’t think at the moment the area really has a unified front. Lamar’s promoting Lamar, La Junta is promoting La Junta. We need more of a unified front.”  

Summer 2016 Potholes And Monument Canyon Jvanwaveren
Photographer: Johanna vanWaveren

Patricia Calhoun, founder and editor of Westword in Denver, is part of a group that bought the World’s Wonder View Tower in Genoa, 101 miles east of Denver, in 2016. The 65-foot tower sits at the highest point between New York and Denver and is now owned by a nonprofit, Friends of the Genoa Tower. 

The roadside attraction where tourists could stop and see six states has been shuttered since previous owner Jerry Chubbuck died in 2013. Calhoun says the restoration project has been bogged down with water and sewer issues, but she’s hopeful the tower will reopen as a community center by 2026, the tower’s 100th anniversary.  

“The vision is certainly to restore it to its traditional role as a way station for travelers and a gathering place for the community,” she says. “It has always had those two roles, but those will be updated for the 21st century so travelers will be able to charge their electric cars if they want.” 

On the table: artists-in-residence and arts programming for local students, concerts and special events, visitors center, food trucks, drive-in movies and maybe a disc golf course. 

Chubbuck’s collection of bizarre relics was auctioned off, so it won’t be a museum. “No more two-headed cows, although we are certainly still trying to procure a two-headed calf, just because everybody remembers that to the nth degree,” Calhoun says. 

Calhoun is also quick to point out new energy in communities like Hugo and Byers, and the amalgam of old and new is producing some interesting results. 

She says the region needs “critical mass of places for people to go, and — let’s face it—attention. Getting the kind of attention so people know there’s an option. You do not have to drive west on I-70 and get stuck in that horrific traffic every weekend. You could head east almost without any traffic and go to some really stunning places.”   

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected]

What’s next for Colorado hotels?

Travel Tourism Report Westin Riverfront Lobby Terrace 2021
The Westin Riverfront in Avon

For Colorado’s lodging industry, the bust followed the best of times. After 2019 set high-water marks for rates and occupancy across the state, the fall was notably steep. 

According to data from the Colorado Hotel and Lodging Association, Colorado hit 69.3% occupancy in March 2019, then the statewide number tumbled to 38.8% in March 2020.

“It was really a devastating year for everybody,” says Richard Scharf, president and CEO of Visit Denver. “When we started 2021, the first quarter looked like 2020.”

Dubbing 2019 “a banner year” for Denver’s hotels, Scharf says Denver does best when group, business and leisure travel are all doing well. While the pandemic took a hatchet to all three legs of the stool, leisure has led the rebound. “Quite honestly, the top has come off and it looks like people are willing to travel,” Scharf says.

Not all has recovered: Scharf forecasts occupancy for metro Denver to approach 60% for the year, versus 73.5% in 2019. A lagging indicator, the average daily rate (ADR) was about $90 as of July 2021, down roughly 30% from $133 in 2019. 

Business and group travel “are coming back slowly,” Scharf says. Group is trickiest, especially when it comes to big events at the Colorado Convention Center. “We book this business five to 10 years out,” Scharf says. “The convention center was still an alternate care facility [in early 2021].” That uncertainty bumped the calendar forward a few months. For example, the 2021 Outdoor Retailer show was moved from June to August.

Leisure is buoyed by being “an outdoor city in an outdoor state,” Scharf adds, but Denver International Airport has proven invaluable, leapfrogging O’Hare in Chicago and Los Angeles International Airport to emerge as the third-busiest airport in the country. “We had unbelievable domestic routes that are still intact,” Scharf says, calling DIA a “lifeline” for the state’s hotels during the pandemic.

Denver-based Sage Hotel Management manages 60 properties, 17 of them in Colorado, primarily in Denver. President and COO Daniel del Olmo says revenue fell by 70% across all properties in 2020, but Colorado was a little better: off by 50% to 60%. The first quarter of 2021 was similarly difficult, he adds, but revenue was only off 2019 levels by 35% as of midsummer; rates were down 13% from 2019.

Summer 2021 is a different story. “The summer is frankly much stronger than we anticipated,” del Olmo says. “We feel very bullish about Colorado.”

The only bottleneck is labor: Sage Hotel Management had a staff of 4,500 at all properties as of August, off from 6,200 before the pandemic, but del Olmo says the company has been struggling to fill 800 open positions nationwide.

Travel Tourism Report Westin Riverfront Lobby 2021
The Westin Riverfront in Avon

Lodgings in mountain towns have bounced back faster than their counterparts on the Front Range. Greg Koehler, owner of the Rabbit Ears Motel in Steamboat Springs, says summer 2021 was “extraordinary.” After a year of deep discounts, rates “are a little bit higher” than 2019, he acknowledges, but lower than the uptick at most of his competitors. 

“This is a difficult environment,” Koehler adds, “but everybody has to be cautiously optimistic.”

The Westin Riverfront Resort & Spa, Avon, Vail Valley, went from fully booked to empty in early April 2020. “It was the worst week of my career to lay off those wonderful associates,” General Manager Kristen Pryor says.

But 2020 ended “better than expected,” she says, despite the loss of all group and conference business – typically 30% of the hotel’s receipts. “The resorts are back but the rest of the state is not,” says Pryor.

Rates have gone up, but so has the cost of business: Pryor says wages are up 5% to 10%, and cleaning costs have increased. Regardless, the hotel has fewer than 300 employees, about 100 fewer than she would like. 

Pryor forecasts group travel could fully recover in 2022, and notes, “I think people again are yearning to meet in person.” Destination weddings at the property usually attract 80% of invited guests; in 2021, that is closer to 100%.

In Durango, occupancy eclipsed 2019 levels (62% for the year) as of early summer. In 2020, occupancy was 47.5%.”There’s a lot of pent-up demand,” says Rachel Brown, executive director at Visit Durango. “We’ve reached our recovery tipping point.”

Brown forecasts sustained growth, and points to a lodger’s tax hike, increasing room taxes from 2% to 5.25% as of June 2021 and Visit Durango’s budget from $1.3 million to $2.3 million. And new lodging properties have added 435 new rooms to Durango in the last two years – a 23% increase.

Tom Foley, senior vice president of business process and analytics of Inntopia, a software provider for the travel industry, says 2020’s decline “wasn’t as bad as feared” for mountain destinations. 

That was largely due to rates holding up nicely. For mountain destinations, average rates stayed within 10% of the preceding highs, unlike “the race to the bottom” seen in 2008-09. “The benchmark of never really giving up rates gave the industry something to build on once that pent-up demand really started to flow in January or February,” Foley says.

Access to the outdoors is driving demand, he adds, with Montana, Wyoming and Utah experiencing similar trends. “Colorado is a bit of the standard bearer, leading the parade,” Foley says.

And there’s also a metaphorical “tidal wave” of spending: Americans saved $1.5 trillion during the pandemic that’s now “burning a hole in people’s mattresses,” Foley says. While summer 2021 saw occupancy up slightly over 2019, rates skyrocketed by about 30% at Colorado’s mountain resorts.

Noting that this rise in rates has outpaced wage growth “by several hundred percent,” Foley says the current trajectory “is unsustainable,” adding, “It’s difficult to say, but my own guess is room rate is going to contract, and people are going to have to consider that next year’s budget is going to have a ton of strong performance in it and still not be able to capture this year’s revenue.”

Top Company 2020: Tourism & Hospitality

Top Co Imprint Group Photo 1
Imprint Events Group

In its 33rd year, ColoradoBiz‘s Top Company honors the Colorado companies that have drive, determination, a vision and a plan and are ultimately making the state a better place to live and work. These three companies – one winner and two finalists –represent the 2020 Top Companies in Tourism & Hospitality.

Winner

SummitCove Lodging

Keystone

When COVID-19 closed Summit County to travelers, SummitCove had guests in-house and hundreds more arriving. It had to close all rentals and cancel future reservations.

That’s when the company culture kicked in.

“Our employees came together and built an extensive list of ideas to bring in additional revenues and cut operational costs without compromising employee benefits,” owner and CEO Peter Reeburgh says. “We were able to generate more revenue in May than ever before by implementing these ideas. We have created brand-new revenue streams that we never had before.”

The company credits Jack Stack’s “The Great Game of Business” system with helping spur growth, make smart decisions and engage its team of 40. SummitCove offers profit-sharing bonus opportunities to employees, along with such perks as ski pass reimbursement, health insurance plans, 401(k) matching program and discounted recreation passes.

“Our secret sauce is doing everything we can to take care of our employees and treat them like family,” Reeburgh says. “We take the stance that if you pay someone a fair wage, add in tons of benefits for everyone — including seasonal employees — that person feels comfortable and like they belong in a family that cares.”

Because of the pandemic, SummitCove launched a new campaign, “Clean It For A Cause,” which donates half of its retail cleaning services booked to the local food bank, the Family Intercultural Resource Center of Summit County, which also benefits from an annual food and clothing drive at the holidays.

Finalists

Imprint Events Group

Denver 

What do you do when your business is shut down by a global pandemic?

Imprint Events Group, which annually produces more than 1,100 events for clients in Colorado, Nevada and Florida, turned on a dime. Within weeks, it had developed a full spectrum of digital and virtual services, established a twice-weekly webinar series for its community, helped found a nonprofit organization to assist frontline workers in need and retained 30 of its 46 employees.

Business is taking a hit, but the 51-year-old company is seeing future opportunities on the rise. In 2019, Imprint produced events in 12 states and five countries, and the addition of virtual services means it can now host events anywhere. It is currently working with a client in Saudi Arabia on a proposed virtual event to take place this fall.

Rocky Mountain Connections (RMC)

Aspen

Since 1989, Rocky Mountain Connections (RMC), North America’s largest privately owned destination management company, has grown from a single location in Aspen to more than 30 destinations across the U.S. and Mexico.

RMC provides premier event-management services to a sophisticated and eclectic clientele of corporate and incentive groups, associations and travel and meeting planners. It is the preferred destination services provider for The Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, Four Seasons, Marriott Luxury Properties and Montage Resorts and is exclusive Colorado hotel partners with a wide range of luxury resorts.

RMC supports Challenge Aspen, which creates adaptive experiences for people with cognitive or physical disabilities; Jazz Aspen Snowmass, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving jazz and supporting musical performances and education in the Roaring Fork Valley; and Trashmasters Aspen Scholarship Fund, which grants college scholarships to area students.

In the age of social distancing, thoughts on tourism distancing arise

Coloradans, and people around the world, are amassing plenty of practice in social distancing. When the tourism business resumes a semblance of normalcy in Colorado, a growing message could be tourism distancing.

That’s because tourism management leaders in the state are using the downtime to work on expanding, improving and formalizing sustainable tourism strategies, including efforts to spread travelers’ love of Colorado more evenly throughout the state.

“It is a great time to focus on sustainability and resilience-planning in tourism so that when people begin traveling again, we are all in a better place,” says Kim Langmaid, Ph.D., associate professor of sustainable studies at Colorado Mountain College.

Langmaid is a workshop leader for the nonprofit Global Sustainable Tourism Council, which establishes and manages global sustainable standards for public policy-makers, destination managers, hotels and tour operators. One goal of the GSTC workshops is for a resort destination to strive for the Mountain IDEAL, a standard which helps mountain towns balance tourism growth with local needs to protect nature and wildlife, improve the well-being of residents and preserve cultural heritage.

The Vail area earned Mountain IDEAL certification in 2018 and is currently undergoing recertification, Langmaid said.

Jessie Burley, Town of Breckenridge sustainability coordinator, says the greater Breckenridge area, including the ski resort, is working toward Mountain IDEAL certification by the end of 2020.

“We’ve hit the reset button, which would have been impossible in other situations,” Burley says of the virus-induced tourism hiatus. “Sustainability is a systems approach, and we have an opportunity to create new systems from this.”

Burley says travelers should seek out mountain resort communities that are putting money and resources into taking care of the environment, reducing waste production and improving housing options and living wages for the local workforce.

“We can make more conscious and value-based decisions on where we want to go and how we want to spend our money,” Burley says.

Tourism Distancing Remedy Tourism
Guests at a farm-to-table dinner at Zephyros Farm and Garden in Delta County enjoy the setting of the farm with the views of the area. Photo credit: J M Imagery.

National surveys show an increasing number of Colorado visitors believe it is very important to choose a destination based on sustainable practices. Those figures rose from 15% in 2017, to 20% in 2018, to 27% in 2019, says Cathy Ritter, Colorado Tourism Office (CTO) director.

After listening to Colorado residents’ concerns, the CTO launched a multi-prong Destination Stewardship Plan in spring 2017 with three core objectives: disperse visitors, share Colorado sustainability ethics and create alliances to magnify the impact of sustainable tourism initiatives.

“One of the really important components of our destination stewardship plan is to disperse travelers to those less visited parts of the state,” Ritter says.

The state office created a searchable online database called Colo-Road Trips that suggests multi-day itineraries for less-traveled destinations to encourage travelers to “try out places in Colorado they never heard of before,” Ritter says. Searches include a “sustainability activity” with tips about responsible tourism or links to donate to causes ranging from Wild Horse Warriors in Moffat County to Trail 2000 in Durango. The CTO will add more “low environmental impact trip” options to the searchable website this year.

Lesser-known tourism destinations may need help to promote their assets responsibly, so the CTO funds a CRAFT program, or Colorado Rural Academy for Tourism. Grants range from $10,000 for destination-level training to $1,000 for organizations or tourism-related businesses. Locations participating in the extensive training in 2018 and 2019 included Huerfano, Grand and Moffat counties and the cities of Trinidad, La Junta and Alamosa.

Overnight tourism in Colorado accounted for $15.8 billion in spending in 2018, Ritter says, with 37.8 million overnight visitors. Of those overnight tourists in 2018, 38% arrived by airplane, a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions.

To reduce their impact, travelers can take positive personal steps by unplugging hotel room refrigerators, turning off air conditioning, carrying reusable eating and drinking supplies, utilizing public transit, or renting bicycles or electric vehicles. Tourists should search for greener lodging properties that participate in sustainability certification programs or offer connections to donate to environmental stewardship programs, Burley says.

In Eagle County, lodging properties and businesses can be certified as more sustainable through the Actively Green program run by nonprofit Walking Mountains Science Center, and travelers can support the Land & Rivers Fund.

In tourist-rich Summit County, businesses can participate in the Resource Wise program, which trains in reducing energy use, waste and carbon emissions.

Steamboat Springs, Aspen and Durango leaders promote Pledge for the Wild, a group of mountain towns supporting responsible tourism in wild places. For example, pledge donations in Steamboat Springs go toward a trail maintenance endowment fund.

Aspen/Pitkin County Airport offers The Good Traveler carbon offset program managed by nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute headquartered in Basalt.

“There is a real opportunity now, as we invite people back to travel, that we join in setting new expectations for how to travel mindfully in regard to our natural environment,” Ritter says.