Tourist bait: are voters to blame for tourism ranking?

Editorial
Copyright 2001 Denver Publishing Company
Article date: June 17, 2001
 

Here we go again. Tourism in Colorado is allegedly down, and voters are being informed that they are at least partly to blame. The problem is that they're unwilling to use public funds to promote private businesses, and said so loud and clear in a 1993 vote.

What they said, in effect, was that resorts and other tourist attractions must follow the example of other businesses - that is, pay for advertising themselves. And no matter how often voters have been rebuked for their stinginess in the intervening years, they don't seem to taken it to heart. There is no groundswell of support for reviving the state tourism tax. Voters just don't buy the idea that out-of-staters will stop visiting here if public money isn't used to sweet-talk them into booking a room in Steamboat Springs or joining a rafting trip through the Royal Gorge.

And neither do we.

Indeed, were state officials foolish enough to hold another referendum on a tourism tax, we predict it would fail by at least as wide a margin (55 to 45 percent) as it did in '93.

We say this in hope that the legislature will not interpret the latest data on tourism as a mandate to increase public spending to promote this state. Not that the tourism news is a ground for complacency. According to the Canadian research firm Longwoods International, Colorado's share of the national vacation tourism market has declined from 2.7 percent to just 1.6 percent since 1992. That's an alarming trend, if accurate, but the market share also needs to be kept in context.

First, the overall market is expanding, and there are still nearly 25 million tourists visiting this state every year.

Second, Colorado retains an almost unrivaled public image across the country, and is usually cited among the top five most desirable tourist destinations in surveys that try to measure such things.

And third, tourists make decisions for many reasons, with the prodding of advertising being only one of them.

Indeed, some of the claims regarding government-funded ad campaigns strain belief. On the Longwoods Web site, for example, an Oregon official is quoted as saying, "our tourism advertising was indeed effective, generating 402,000 new trips at a cost of $1.22 per trip." Don't you love the precision of that pronouncement? Not merely 400,000 new trips, but exactly 402,000. Cross their hearts.

Longwoods officials are obviously sympathetic to such claims, and have not concealed their surprise at the alleged backwardness of Colorado voters. The president of Longwoods even applauded the Colorado legislature for flouting voter wishes the past two years and appropriating millions for a new Colorado Tourism Office to promote the state as a travel destination. Doing without a state-funded tourism campaign, Longwoods Bill Siegel said, "was a bit like owning a Ferrari, but not having any money for gasoline."

We hold a somewhat different view. If most Colorado voters do not wish to match the lavish expenditures of other states promoting tourism (Hawaii, $60 million!), then maybe they have reasons that ought to be respected. Maybe they believe that the men and women in the tourism business are smart and creative and self-reliant enough - and that they're selling a fine enough product - that they will survive and thrive even without the help of taxpayers.

The mystery to us is not why voters may believe this, but why so many lawmakers don't.
 

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