Photo by Liz Copan / Summit Daily Archives
Officials at Breckenridge City Council and the Breckenridge Tourism Office said on Tuesday that they plan to reevaluate events in the city after the pandemic, refocusing on what tourism office chairwoman Lucy Kay has described as “responsible tourism” .
“The goal we will have – and it is consistent with more progressive ones (target marketing organizations) – is to look for ways to target customers whose sets of values align with ours,” said Kay on Tuesday. “… Find out who the people are who think about the environment, who think about other people, who think about the world in a similar way to us, and try to invite those people first.”
Breckenridge Mayor Eric Mamula said the city’s events and resilience committees, along with the tourist office, will continue to discuss the initiative in the coming weeks.
The mayor said it is his personal belief that the pandemic offers an opportunity that is “a good restart for our community” to analyze what kind of events should take place.
“This is really a blank slate and I think it is worth continuing these conversations,” said board member Carol Saade.
The concept is not new. Even before the pandemic, cities across Summit County struggled with “event fatigue” among residents and worked to find solutions.
“It’s a good way to look at it and say, ‘OK, what are the events that are a kind of legacy for the city? And what are the events that we are – honestly – filling space for no reason, ”said Mamula. “The city is busy anyway. It seems like there are many weekends where we do things we don’t really need. “
Mamula warned against adding too many events in an effort to “get the economy going in one summer” and noted that some people in the community may be anxious that “things will go back to where they were two years ago on day 1” after the pandemic ended .
“We will have to resist this feeling that we need to live in a crazy land again,” said Mamula.
Kay agreed that “there is no hurry” in the initiative because “we are still in this COVID thing for a long time”.
Kay said the tourism office plans to do another survey with residents, potentially in late March or early April, to understand “what does the community really want in this new world order?”
Board members Jeffery Bergeron, Kelly Owens and Erin Gigliello said they were unsure how many events the city needs to attract visitors. Bergeron and Owens pointed to the demand that the city saw in its tracks last summer, when all events were canceled, as a reason to reduce in the future.
Council member Dennis Kuhn said he would like to see the city host a “celebration for the whole community” once the pandemic is over, although he said “this is obviously a way forward”.
Holiday accommodation falls 17%
Also during Tuesday’s meeting, Kay briefed the city on accommodation trends during the Christmas and New Year holidays.
From December 15 to January 3, the city fell about 17%, or 4,000 overnight stays, compared to the same dates last year, said Kay, adding that most of that decline occurred in the last two weeks of December due to many cancellations. She said the numbers from November 30 to December 15 were “much stronger”.
For January, she said the city expects a 20% reduction in daily rates with a forecast of a 16% reduction for the entire winter. Interestingly, Kay said that local accommodation providers told the tourist office that the length of stay was shorter than normal.
Kay said the office should have better data in the next two weeks, thanks to new destination marketing reports that track trends in the city using cell phone data. Kay said it could help the city more accurately quantify how many people are visiting.
Kay said the tourist office also surveyed visitors and found that the mix of people in town during the holidays was “quite comparable to what it normally would be at Christmas time”. Kay said that these surveys reflected 53% of destination guests were from outside the state, while almost none were from abroad – a figure that is typically around 5%.
“And a lot more from Texas,” said Kay. “Texas is always our biggest market outside of Colorado, and Texas was really big this Christmas season.”
Kay also pointed to what she said was an apparent trend for more visitors to Breckenridge to stay at out-of-town lodging properties. The number of respondents who reported being in Breckenridge fell to 79% this holiday season, compared with 89% last year, said Kay.
Kay also said that more people are booking hotels directly through accommodation and property providers, rather than intermediaries like Airbnb and VRBO. Kay thinks it is because it is easier for renters to cancel their reservation in a more traditional way.
As for research questions related to the corornavirus, Kay said respondents gave a rating of 8.9 on a scale of 10 for the degree of safety in Breckenridge while on vacation. The scores were 9.3 for how well visitors were prepared for the city’s COVID-19 expectations and 8.6 for whether respondents considered the protocols to be appropriate.