Once the travel bug bites, there is no known antidote…
— British actor Michael Palin
A few days ago, my friend Bob and his girlfriend Zoë left for a vacation in Greece, having been bitten by the travel bug.
I’m not sure if people celebrate ‘Black Friday’ in Greece? Josh and Zoë might be missing out on the biggest sales event of the year. Were they thinking that a photograph at the Acropolis was more valuable than a 20% discount on Hello Kitty throw-pillows?
But missing out on ‘Black Friday’ is not the worst part of tourist travel. The worst part of tourist travel, is tourist travel. Something I personally try and avoid. For so many reasons.
Of course, living in Pagosa Springs, it’s impossible to avoid the tourists as they stumble into town. And I don’t actually try to avoid them — which, as noted, is nearly impossible. I simply want to make sure I don’t become one of them.
That doesn’t seem like a popular attitude these days, however, among my fellow citizens. US consumers are getting bitten by the travel bug in increasing numbers. Sort of like a pandemic… but more serious?
The following chart is based on information from the experts at the Conference Board.
It looks like almost a quarter of US consumers are planning a vacation to a foreign country within the next 6 months. (That number is probably slightly inaccurate, because many US consumers think Alaska is a foreign country.) That’s a lot of Americans leaving the country. Or at least, planning to leave.
As we can see in that graph, our foreign travel has been increasing since 1967, but recently two unusual things happened.
In 2020 — the thin gray line under the word “respondents” — COVID arrived and US consumers suddenly stopped traveling to foreign countries. For various reasons… including the fact that foreign countries didn’t want Americans bringing COVID germs with them. (As you may recall, we had one of the highest infection rates in the world.)
Expectations for foreign travel dropped drastically.
Based on my recollection of that time period, a huge percentage of the tourists who normally would have traveled to a foreign country traveled to Pagosa Springs instead. We’re semi-exotic, and sort of like a Third World country… and we gladly welcomed the tourists so long as they wore masks and washed their hands.
Then, starting in the summer of 2022, US consumers starting thinking about foreign travel again. (Including Alaska.) A lot of them have visited Pagosa already… and after you’ve done the hot springs and tubed down the river… well, there’s really not much to do here. Compared to, say, Greece?
If the early Pagosa settlers had been thinking about the future, they would have built an Acropolis here. Instead, they built Highway 160, to help people get through Pagosa as quickly as possible without stopping. (The early settlers had their own ideas about tourist travel.)
My point being, the tourists who packed Pagosa’s hot springs pools in 2020 and 2021 — and made us wait 45 minutes for a table at our own restaurants — are now pretty much headed for Greece, and Thailand, and Spain, and Costa Rica. I wish them all the best, while noting that the phrase, “the travel bug bites”, can have more than one interpretation.
Meanwhile, Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) is planning to rip up Highway 160 through downtown, and rebuild it… over the next two years.
Which is probably great timing, considering where US consumers are headed for their vacations over the next couple of years.
And that brings us back to the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board, which has recently undergone some criticism from local business owners for falling down on the job. The job being, to subsidize and grow the tourism industry, at all costs.
One of the costs? From my perspective? A functioning, diverse community.
The Town Council and the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners do not share my perspective. Our elected leaders honestly believe that a subsidized tourism industry has been making Pagosa Springs a more pleasant place to live.
It has certainly made Pagosa Springs a more pleasant place to visit. And the eight Springs Resort geothermal baths currently under construction along the banks of the San Juan River seem to promise an ever more attractive Pagosa experience.
More attractive for tourists, I mean.
Maybe the new Resort hotel, also under construction, can serve as our Acropolis.
As I mentioned in Part Two, the new Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) between the Town and County stacks the Tourism Board heavily with industry representatives, rather than ‘community’ representatives. It also directs the Tourism Board to use the tax funds contributed by the County government (but not the funds contributed by the Town government) exclusively for tourism marketing — as opposed to other possible needs related to tourism.
For example, this rule would presumably prohibit the Tourism Board from using County contributions to help sponsor the annual Halloween Hootenanny that I wrote about last month. This rule would also prohibit the use of County funding for addressing our housing crisis — a crisis that seriously and directly impacts the viability of our tourism industry.
The paragraphs in the IGA that limit the uses of the County funds read like this:
2.1.5 Capital Expenditure projects may be considered by the Tourism Board, if they are tourism related in that the project will improve the experience of the visitor; however, only the Town’s Lodging Tax revenue may be used for such projects as the County’s Lodging Tax is restricted by C.R.S. § 30-11-107.5 to only the marketing and advertising of local tourism.
2.1.6 Most annual expenditures will fall into the category of “external marketing”. An annual budget will be created by the Tourism Board, dividing projected expenditures into the categories of 1) External Marketing, 2) Event Promotion and 3) Capital Expenditure…
We’re going to consider the legal implications of those paragraphs on Friday.
Read Part Four…