Alaska Travel Industry summer review: spotty gains in some areas of state.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: TOURISM

While Alaska's tourism industry continued last summer to experience its share of white-water conditions, vendors were scrambling to hold on and achieve a tenuous stability amid cruise revenue losses and uncertainty about what the future will bring.

The state entered the 2010 tourist season braced for about a 9 percent drop in overall tourism traffic, including an expected loss of about 140,000 fewer cruise passengers, reflected Ron Peck, president and chief operating officer of the Alaska Travel Industry Association (ATIA) in Anchorage.

Normally, visitors services, until recently a growth industry, is credited with bringing several billion dollars into the state and providing 40,000 jobs, but Petroleum News in August assessed losses during two years at about 5,000 jobs and $420 million in spending, which Peck confirmed.

2010 SUMMER NUMBERS UNKNOWN

While updated visitor compilations, including July through September figures, weren't available in mid-August, clearly the slump did impact operations at Denali Park, in the Fairbanks area and other destinations in Interior and Southeast.

The head tax stemmed from a successful ballot initiative passed in 2006. Still, Peck said, some relief is likely in the travel sector. Legislative actions reducing head tax liability by more than 43 percent for next season have lifted hopes, he said, that during this fall and winter, cruise lines may reintroduce some ships for 2012.

Meanwhile, the tourism picture in 2010 seemed to be more of a collage than any unified rendering. In many areas, gains were spotty at best, with some businesses hitting a home run while others continued to experience pain and frustration from the bench, depending on a host of factors, including travelers served and cost of services. Where there were reports that business was up, there often was talk of slight increases.

Overall, tourism in Alaska in 2009 totaled 1.83 million visitors, including 242,500 fall/winter visitors and 1.6 million May through September, according to ATIA. That was down from 1.95 million in 2008, including 1.7 million summer and 247,400 winter visitors. Alaska hosted a million cruise visitors in 2008 and 2009-600,000 for round-trip Inside Passage and 400,000 for one-way gulf cruises, Peck said, with about half of the latter group taking a land excursion. In 2010, the Port of

Anchorage hosted one cruise liner arriving from Seattle every two weeks.

For the 2011 season, there were several developments that Peck, in mid-August, was anticipating would help bring some relief to the picture:

* With Oceania and Disney cruises...