Despite grim projections last spring, many of Colorado’s high-country resort communities saw waves of in-state visitors in the fall and early winter fill local coffers.
John Norton, Gunnison County’s tourism czar, was talking to his board last April. The ski resort had closed abruptly. Lodging and restaurants were closed. Visitors were being told to leave. The pandemic was triggering a panic in tourist-based economies across the country.
A board member asked how much the Gunnison River Valley tourism community could expect to lose. Norton guessed: down 25%, maybe even 50% for the year.
“A couple board members told me I was being overly optimistic,” said Norton, the director of the valley’s Tourism and Prosperity Partnership. “I just didn’t know. Nobody could know. The last pandemic was a century ago, right? But to end up where we did, that is something I never, ever would have predicted.”
In fact, lodging sales tax revenue from the Gunnison valley ended 2020 up 11.5% from the year before. In the town of Crested Butte, net taxable sales jumped 5.7% in 2020 to $119.9 million.
“We are all just shaking our heads over here,” Norton said.
The worst-case scenario never happened
The sky-is-falling scenario projected in the dark, early days of the pandemic never materialized in Colorado’s high country. A survey of sales tax reports filed by 20 resort communities shows combined spending in those places fell by only 3% in 2020 compared with the previous year.
Some communities — Copper Mountain, Keystone, Breckenridge, Vail and Aspen, for example — saw steeper declines, but not nearly as painful as projected last spring, when the threat of contagion appeared poised to decimate tourism businesses across the state.
And early reports show the 2020-21 ski season will end far outperforming projections, with visitors and residents spending like a regular ski season, despite capacity limits at ski resorts, restaurants and lodges, and a lack of public attendance at big-draw events and concerts.
It looked dire last spring. A terrible March tumbled into a dismal April, with spending in the 20 high country communities down 39%. While it was impossible to tell then, those months marked the nadir of 2020, and just about every community across the mountains started climbing out of that hole by early summer.
There are a lot of reasons why mountain economies didn’t collapse last year. Federal stimulus dollars bolstered bank accounts. Online shopping funneled more sales taxes into small-town coffers. Restaurants expanded into streets. City leaders dug deep to help. More people were eating and nesting at home, so grocers and essential retailers enjoyed big upticks in business.
Second-home owners settled in resort communities for the winter, fleeing their city homes. Short-term rentals were wildly popular with vacationers, supporting the flow of lodging taxes.
And in general, Front Rangers flocked to Colorado’s mountain towns in the past year, enjoying the outdoors and space to roam. Those staycationers helped offset what would normally have been a crippling decline in destination and international visitors, who stay longer and spend big.
Glenwood Springs handed out $100 certificates to overnight, midweek visitors redeemable at all sorts of businesses around the city. The Glenwood Gold Community Currency program fueled a strong rebound, not just from the pandemic-related closures but from the lingering impacts of the wildfire on the city’s doorstep.
After a 91% drop in lodging tax revenue in April, the community currency plan helped Glenwood Springs finish 2020 only 4% behind 2019 — which is even more impressive considering the tourist-reliant city was inaccessible for two critical weeks in July when Interstate 70 closed in Glenwood Canyon during the Grizzly Creek fire.
“When your economy relies on tourism and things are closed and there isn’t anything happening, it is really a slippery slope for businesses worrying whether they will make it or not,” Visit Glenwood Springs Tourism Director Lisa Langer said, noting how the Glenwood Gold spending plan has been adopted in recent months by communities like Redmond, Washington.
Langer credits her community’s success last year not just to the certificates but also to city support, like grants to struggling businesses and providing portable heaters to restaurants with outdoor dining.
“We all came together and it worked,” Langer said. “Very few if any businesses failed. We even had restaurants purchased and opened during the pandemic. We have businesses expanding. Talk about resiliency.”
Read the full article on Colorado Sun.
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