Q&A: Travel & Tourism.

• Position: Industry Outlook

Nan Groves Anderson

Utah Tourism Industry

Coalition

Dirk Beal

Deer Valley Resort

Scott Beck

Visit Salt Lake

Dennis Copyak

Le Bus

Dan Crooker

Snowbird Ski and

Summer Resort

Chris Erickson

The Grand America

Jason Ford

Sheraton Salt Lake City

Hotel

Scott George

Woodbury Corporation

Alan Hess

Hess Travel

Kathy Hirst

Morris Murdock Travel

Scott Lunt

Western States Lodging

Bill Malone

Park City Chamber & Visitors Bureau

Brian Merrill

Western River Expeditions

Joel Racker

Utah Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau

Nathan Rafferty

Ski Utah

David Scott

Marriott Downtown

Sara Toliver

Visit Ogden

Vicki Varela

Utah Office of Tourism

Neil Wilkinson

Temple Square Hospitality

Matt Wirthlin

Holland & Hart, LLP

By all accounts, 2015 was a banner year for Utah's tourism industry, and 2016 may be even better But longtime challenges like labor shortages and negative perceptions remain, and new challenges are emerging as the industry grapples with disruptive services like Airbnb and Uber.

A special thank you to Mark White, vice president of sales for Visit Salt Lake, for moderating the discussion,

QA

How would you describe the current state of tourism in Utah?

These are good times for tourism in Utah. The high-level number is $7.8 billion in tourism spending. That translates into $1.07 billion in state and local tax revenues. That's money that goes to our schools, to our roads, to all of our local needs. It's creating a great quality of life for our state.

~Vicki Varela

VARELA: Another indicator is what our visitors are saying. We had a wonderful accolade recently from Fodor's, which is the bible of travel guides. They traditionally name 25 interesting places that you should think about visiting in the next year. Their editors sat down this year and said, "25? That's an awful lot. Let's pick one top destination in the world." And they named Utah. Quite an accolade. Quite a testimonial to all the hard work that's been done by the industry over many years to build that brand.

There are so many different ways that tourism is building our state's reputation, not just as a place to visit, but a place to build your business, to get a great job. Another way it affects our quality of life is through the money that is invested into our arts and our recreation facilities--that's all a benefit to us as residents, expanding all the opportunities we have to enjoy arts and recreation.

BECK: Salt Lake County had two new high watermarks in 2015. We set a new record for hotel revenue in the county, which surpasses the 2007 benchmark. (Meaning it took us nine years to recover from the economic downturn.) We also set new attendance records at the Salt Palace Convention Center, surpassing the Olympic year. And that was across the board. So all of the events we hosted had attendance greater than both we had forecasted and the individual groups.

Doterra, for example, blew up from a convention of 7,000 people four years ago to now nearly 19,000 people. Outdoor Retailer Summer Market hit a record with over 26,000 people here. So as we look to 2016, it's going to be hard to meet the same attendance records, but we're looking very favorably on what the hotel revenues will do. We may surpass hotel revenues again in 2016 based on the strength of our economy.

TOLIVER: We saw record revenues in our conference center. We saw record revenues from our hotels. We set records in our transient room tax collection and all of our tourism taxes at our hotels. 2015 was a great year and we're looking at 2016, hoping we can match those numbers.

RACKER: It was a banner year for our convention center that we opened three and a half years ago. It returned money to the county this year. That's unusual for a lot of convention centers. But we're seeing more groups and diverse types of groups. There's kind of the sweet spot that works in Utah County, but we're being recognized as a nice third- or fourth-tier destination.

The rebuild of 1-15 over the Point of the Mountain is going to help. We don't even talk about Provo as being separate from Salt Lake International Airport. If you've flown into Denver, we're just as close, if not closer. We've had some success with sharing a list of all the direct flights, especially when we're competing against Boise or other areas where we can say 70 percent of your flights are going to go through Salt Lake anyway.

RAFFERTY: There is a lot going on in Utah's ski industry this year. This year we saw investment in our ski industry like we haven't seen since the Olympic Winter Games in 2002. Snowbird put $35 million into its resort this winter, including a huge upgrade to the Cliff Lodge, and, importantly, the new building on the summit that has been 40 years in the making. Park City put $50 million into its resort this year. That is the single largest single season upgrade in the history of American skiing, and it created the largest ski area in America, which is pretty cool for us to have that moniker.

We have 14 resorts, and over half of them have changed hands in the last five years. That's not because people are ditching them, it's because people are grabbing them. They want to be here in Utah. Everybody's got their eyes on us.

Nationwide, the ski industry is fairly flat. The industry is so tough to take a really good look at because we're so dependent on the snow. Our national skier association divides the nation up into six different regions. All six had below average, and some really below average, snowfall last year. So we ride this roller coaster of Mother Nature. But in general, it's flat.

BEAL: Although we need to garner the vast majority of our revenue in the winter, our seasons are really spreading out. The non-ski season is how I would describe it, and it has really increased faster than the winter season. The bookends of the group business component on our opportunity seasons in spring and fall, combined with the biggest increases in the summer, and just having larger increases for leisure guests coming in the summer and group visitors in the spring and fall. So while our core will always be the winter, the opportunities might come out of non-winter.

MALONE: We had a strong summer this year. Interestingly, we had a really strong September and October, and it's business travel. We've really bounced back from the period of time when we were told not to go to places like Park City on a business trip. It's become a stronger and stronger part of our early summer and late summer offerings. The core of the summer is still leisure. But in those shoulder seasons it's been strong.

We're seeing a little bit of a problem in the international business. I think a lot of that is just temporary in terms of exchange rates and things like that. With Vail Resorts operating Park City now, they have a strong international clientele, so we'll rebound and see benefit from that. But that's the only kind of gray area we're seeing in terms of this winter. We're seeing really strong reservations on the books moving forward for the rest of the season.

CROOKER: We are putting a lot of money into the resort. That's very common in the resort industry these days. If you don't stay on par and you don't create something new and exciting, you're going to fall behind. Which is why a lot of that capital investment is happening today. And we're seeing success with it. We're starting this season with a lot of buzz. Mother Nature helped quite a bit, which...