PHOTO: A Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board meeting in 2021.
When I wrote Parts One and Two of this editorial series, I didn’t have a copy of a recent “letter”, submitted to the Board of County Commissioners and the Pagosa Springs Town Council by certain tourist-related businesses, urging changes in the way the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board operates.
I was generously provided a copy yesterday, by County Commissioner Ron Maez.
Regarding the question of whether the Tourism Board and its staff have done an adequate job of promoting Pagosa tourism, I believe Commissioner Maez and I are in agreement. Yes, we’ve had plenty of tourists.
We may not agree, however, about whether the overall community has been actually been hurt by too much tourism.
The letter from the tourist-related businesses begins:
The following letter summarizes the collective perspectives and suggestions from the lodgers located within Pagosa Springs Township and Archuleta County. In light of current situation where the Town of Pagosa Springs Council and Archuleta Commissioners will be working to revisit their joint MOU on Tourism, we as lodgers would like to share our feedback and suggestions. At the September 2023 Tourism meeting, lodgers were encouraged to unify and bring a collaborative message of what we would like to see from the tourism board. At that same meeting, the County informed the board of their intent to withdraw from the collaboration between the Town and County as there are questions as to how the monies are being spent. As the MOU will be revisited, please see the following recommendations from the Lodgers of Pagosa Springs and Archuleta County.
You can download the letter here.
As mentioned in Part Two, the letter listed 25 businesses… but some of the owners listed multiple businesses.
Elk Trace Bed and Breakfast
Hillside Inn
Alpine Inn
West End Lodge
Healing Waters and Resort
Elkwood Manor Bed and Breakfast
Fireside Cabins
Motel Soco
El Camino Lounge and Grill
The Springs Resort and Spa
Riverwalk Inn
(Shelly and Jason’s STR LLC?)
Riff Raff on the Rio
Riff Raff Brewing Co.
The Nightingale Motel
The Neon Mallard
Pagosa River Domes
High Creek Lodge
Melissa Moeller, Local STR owner
Olivia Modern, Local STR owner
Nicole and Pete Macomber, Local STR Owner
Jacque Aragon, Local STR owner
Jenifer Pitcher Local STR owner
Angelina Waterman, Local STR owner
Michael Collins, Local STR Owner
For example, the Nightingale Motel, The Neon Mallard, Pagosa River Domes, and High Creek Lodge are all part of the same team of investors. Same with Riff Raff Brewing, Riff Raff on the Rio, and Shelly and Jason’s STR LLC; same owners. Ditto, El Camino Lounge and SOCO Motel; same owners and location.
So actually, it would appear that only 19 business groups were represented… in my humble opinion, a rather meager representation of the approximately 1,600 businesses located in Archuleta County.
But as they say, the squeaky wheel typically gets the grease.
The letter makes seven specific suggestions, including this one:
1. Engage a third-party expert to provide the following:
a. Benchmarks/Best Practices best suited for Pagosa Area Tourism — The establishment of clear benchmarks against which the tourism department should measure its performance in order to determine its effectiveness — ROIs, KPIs, website traffic, conversions attributable to tourism efforts, etc. using industry best practices. The expert should know these, and you have heard many of them from the Colorado Tourism Office (CTO).
I am personally acquainted with most of the 19 business teams that signed the letter, and I would classify them generally as highly intelligent, ambitious, and business-savvy. Obviously, they all want to see the tourism industry thrive.
That being said, I seriously doubt that many of them have “engaged a third-party expert” (from somewhere? for some dollar amount?) to establish business benchmarks and performance measures for their own businesses. I assume that these smart, ambitious, business-savvy owners know their own businesses better — and more importantly, know Pagosa Springs better — than any “third-party expert”. Of course, I could be wrong about that.
Yet here we have these same smart, ambitious, business-savvy folks implying that a “third-party expert” will understand the Pagosa tourism market, and the complex history of that market, better than our local VisitPagosaSprings.com staff, with decades of life experience in Pagosa?
Pardon me if I note that a “third-party expert” was hired to write Pagosa’s 48-page “Destination Master Plan” in 2019 — and totally neglected to discuss the most serious problem of all: a serious lack of housing that meets the needs of low-wage workers in the tourism industry.
Nor did the “Destination Master Plan” mention the second most serious problem: too many summer tourists for our limited tourism infrastructure.
Nor did the letter from the 19 business groups make mention of these two problems: the workforce housing crisis, and the overcrowded summer conditions.
The letter also states:
In addition to reporting on the execution of the Plan, the tourism department should provide regular (monthly) reports to the public using the performance metrics established by the third-party expert as being industry best-practices.
As we discussed in Part Two, three of the key performance metrics used in resort communities, for analyzing tourism trends — Occupancy, Average Daily Rate, and Revenue Per Available Room — must be supplied by each individual lodging company. But the lodging businesses in Pagosa have steadfastly refused to provide that data, for the Tourism Board and staff to analyze.
So, with all of this in mind, I’d like to write next about cigarette smoking…
Because I see a correlation.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.