Photo: The Springs Resort motel, spa, restaurant and soaking pools expansion under construction in Pagosa Springs, 2024.
I previously used the word “weird” to describe a recent Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board meeting. I hope today’s editorial can explain that choice.
Yesterday in Part Three, we discussed some claims made by the 13-member Pagosa Lodgers Association… that, collectively, they are seeing future bookings, in the “six-to-eight week window”, pacing at 25% below last year. This claim was made at the July 2 meeting of the Tourism Board, and seemed to strike some of the Board members as slightly unbelievable.
Also hard to believe was a claim that bookings were down a similar amount in April and May.
The Lodgers Association had submitted a printed sheet that stated, in part:
Current Market Conditions
Our member properties are experiencing significant year-over-year declines in business:
April and May bookings were down approximately 22-25% compared to last year…
Our goal is to understand what strategies the Tourism Department has in place to address the current slowdown…
During the meeting, Lodgers Association representative Jesse Hensle stated that the Association can provide aggregated booking data from the Association’s 13 members, and argued that the Association data would be more accurate and useful, and cheaper, than supplying Pagosa data to a tourism tracking company such as STR Global.
“What is the benefit? There’s other information [other than occupancy and room rates] that we can find about the success of our tourism marketing and whether it’s effective or not… So as we talk about it as a group, who wants to be involved, who does not want to be involved, and there’s a large contingency who would prefer not to share their data [with a company like STR Global].”
This debate — around the reluctance of motel owners to share their data with the Tourism Board, and at the same time, the accusation that the Tourism Board’s marketing effort is not as effective as it could be — has been plaguing the Tourism Board for several years now, without any clear resolution on the horizon.
From what I can tell as an outside observer, some of the tension in the lodging industry is between the motels — who might be seen as the ‘dinosaurs’ of the industry — and the Short-Term Rentals, the STRs — the upstart newcomers who in many cases offer, instead of a motel room, an entire house.
Mr. Hensle claimed that the information from consultants Blue Host, regarding STR stays, doesn’t clearly indicate whether Pagosa’s tourism industry, as a whole, is growing.
“The STR data measured the property’s capture of the market. It does not show if the market is growing… and that is the objective when I look at the mission of the Tourism Board. To grow tourism here.
“All [the STR data] is going to say is, ‘My property captured X amount of business that came to Pagosa, and I stole it from [local motel owner] Sarah, or from [local motel owner] Anne-Marie. Now Anne-Marie has to make a business decision to steal it back.'”
It’s pretty clear to me, from the words “stole” and “steal”, that certain people are viewing the tourism industry as a competitive, rather than as a cooperative, state of affairs.
Or maybe not?
Mr. Hensle: “As far as working together, [the Lodgers Association] is all about it. And I think we’ve demonstrated that. We’ve scheduled meetings. We’ve announced ourselves. We’ve set up subcommittees…”
If you look at the performance of the Pagosa STR sector during April and May, shown below — the same months when the Lodgers Association claimed their bookings were “down 22-25%” — we see Days Booked that exceeded both 2023 and 2024.
During the meeting, Tourism Board member Austin Marchand stated that bookings for his business — Rocky Mountain Balloon Adventures — have increased this year by about 20%. Stuart Scull of Pagosa Vacation Homes stated that the bookings in the numerous STRs he manages are up by 22% this year. Shane Prince stated that Wyndham bookings are up by 4%. And the Town’s Lodging Tax revenues thus far are also up slightly over last year.
So we have this weird situation. All the hard data available to the Tourism Board seems to indicate a reasonably healthy, and growing, tourism market.
But the claims coming from the Pagosa Lodgers Association point to a somewhat desperate need to spend more marketing dollars, immediately if not sooner.
A few questions come to mind.
1. Did the Lodgers Association miscalculate their numbers?
2. Has the downtown CDOT highway reconstruction project hit the motels particularly hard, because so many of them are downtown… while the rest of the industry has been less impacted?
3. Did the Springs Resort negatively impact the rest of Pagosa’s motel industry by adding 78 more luxury rooms… while having a minimal effect on STRs and the rest of the tourism industry?
As Board member Shane Prince pointed out, the job of the Tourism Board is to market tourism in a holistic manner, to benefit the entire industry — lodging, restaurants, gift shops, recreation providers, guiding services, etc.— not just a subsection of the industry — motels — that might, for whatever reasons, be struggling in 2025.
For many years, the Tourism Board has recognized that Pagosa Springs has enough tourists — maybe more than enough — in July. Much of the Board’s marketing efforts have focused on the so-called “shoulder seasons” when tourist are few and far between. (Compare April to March, for example, in the above STR Bookings chart.)
We will also note that the Tourism Board — and presumably also, the new Lodgers Association — has almost no representation from the Pagosa retail industry. If anyone is struggling financially during the summer of 2025, we must assume it’s the downtown retail businesses and restaurants.
Here are the two new temporary parking lots developed by the Town of Pagosa Springs… “Free Parking” created to make up for the downtown parking spots eliminated by the CDOT highway project. Photographed on the afternoon on June 6… normally, the height of the tourist season.
From what I can tell, the volunteers on the Tourism Board and the Main Street Advisory Board, and the Tourism staff, have been quite busy lately, working to keep downtown businesses viable during the CDOT reconstruction project.
We will see, by the end of the highway reconstruction in the fall of 2026, how successful they’ve been.