EDITORIAL: The Dream of a Tourism Revival, Part Two

Read Part One

Pagosa Springs is a beautiful town in Southwestern CO. Whether you want adventure, relaxation or the party scene, Pagosa has it all! See for yourself!

— from the VisitPagosaSprings Facebook page, June 6, 2020

At the June 2 meeting of the Pagosa Springs Town Council, the question placed squarely before the Council members was a fairly simple one, considering the complexity of the current situation.

When should the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board and its staff begin “welcoming” tourists back to Pagosa Springs?

Indeed… as summer settles over Pagosa, with hot sunny days alternating with thunderstorms, tourism feels a bit like something that happened “in the past.” Not the “distant past” but rather, the “recent past.” Whether we will ever get back to the levels of tourism we saw in 2019, no one knows at this point. It seems like the world may have turned a corner and things might be somewhat different, going forward.

Or maybe everything will get back to normal, eventually?

Here’s Tourism Director Jennie Green, speaking to the Council about where we are at the moment.

“Luckily, we’ve had rain the last few days, but we still do have a rather significant [fire danger] situation underway… my team has put together information that we will begin to promote… Posters are being distributed, and we’re trying to get them into as many vacation rentals as we can…

“We’re currently not trying to encourage visitation. We’re also not trying to discourage visitation. Just providing helpful information…”

The Tourism staff are employees of the Town government, although a minor portion of the tax-funded budget is provided by the Archuleta County Lodgers Tax. The larger share of taxes gets remitted by lodging operations located within the town limits, which gives the Town Council a larger share of the authority, perhaps, over how the money gets spent, and when, exactly, the Tourism staff ought to begin “welcoming” tourists back to Pagosa Springs.

Ms. Green had included a couple of graphs in her Town Council presentation, showing the drop-off in visitor arrivals and also, a decline in visits to the VisitPagosaSprings.com website. We shared the first graphic — numbers of visitor arrivals — in Part One on Friday.

The decline in physical visitation, beginning in mid-March, was dramatic. The decline in ‘virtual’ visitation also took a hit.

As we see the charts below, the VisitPagosaSprings.com website saw about 20,000 “users” in January 2019, climbing to almost 25,000 by March — then a slight dip in April before climbing to nearly 30,000 in June 2019. (I suppose I was one of those users; I visit this website regularly to keep up on Pagosa events.) But the story was a bit different in 2020.

January 2020 users once again clocked in at around 20,000, but then traffic — instead of increasing — steadily dropped off, falling to fewer than 10,000 users in April.

May 2020, however, showed a surprising growth in website users, climbing to about 17,000 — close to the 22,000 seen in May 2019.

We might note that, according to the information provided to the Town Council, this spike in visitor interest indicated by May 2020 user data took place without the help of an aggressive marketing campaign. The Tourism staff had “paused” their active advertising in mid-March.

So how do we explain the dramatically increased interest in May? Is it possible people are looking to visit Pagosa, all on their own, even without any ongoing promotion? Have we actually been wasting money on expensive government-funded advertising?

Those were not the questions before the Town Council on Tuesday, however. The question was, rather, how soon do we want to start spending the big bucks again, to welcome the tourists back?

Ms. Green:

“There’s generally a 30-45 day ‘booking window’, so if we begin actively inviting visitors back today, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to be slammed, you know, within a few days. We’re certainly seeing an increased number of visitors coming into town. Those are the folks that we don’t have to invite back. It could be second-home owners or people who are familiar with Southwest Colorado, so really the advertising efforts are really going to… it’s going to help bring folks, who might not be as familiar with Pagosa, back to town.”

Ms. Green pointed out that the marketing could be directed toward “people that the Council might be more comfortable inviting back.”

Who might that be? Those people we would be “comfortable” with…?

National Geographic has been sharing some informative maps and charts, showing the progress of COVID infections and deaths across the US, and I grabbed a graphic image this past weekend.

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Where cases are growing and declining

The darker blue are the areas where the per capita rate of new infections are declining most dramatically. The darker red indicates areas where infections have been recently increasing. White areas are seeing no recent change in the rate…

…which is not the same as “no new infections”… but rather, no change in the new infection rate.

Here’s the general geographic area that sends the most visitors to Pagosa Springs — which is almost exclusively “drive-in traffic” as opposed to “fly-in traffic.”

Archuleta County — which is reporting no new cases over the past couple of weeks — is shown in yellow.

As we might notice, Arizona appears to be problematic… as do two neighboring Colorado counties, Saguache and Rio Grande.

To judge by this simple map, it looks like a toss-up which regions the Town Council might reasonably wish to begin “welcoming people back” from. A roll of the dice, you might say. Except maybe Arizona would be a poor choice?

All of this could easily change, of course… if we start seeing new outbreaks. While the tourist ‘booking window’ could be ’30-45 days’, the ‘infection outbreak window’ seems to be much shorter. Like, 7-14 days.

In the end, the Town Council didn’t want to wait a single day to start advertising again.

“I’d say, open it up now,” proposed Council member Mat deGraaf.

“Yeah, I agree,” said Council member Matt DeGuise. “Website traffic is already back to where it was [in May 2019.] People are already here, who we didn’t advertise to. So if there’s a 30-45 day lag time, we might as well get the ball rolling.”

Council member Maddie Bergon, agreed. “As long as the emphasis is on messaging that says, ‘Be safe. Do your part’…”

Yes, you can visit. Bring your mask. Don’t get too friendly.

Read Part Three…

Bill Hudson

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.