Summit and Wasatch counties.

• Position: Regional Report - Interview

Like the rest of the state, Wasatch and Summit counties are feeling a hit; yet, leaders remain cautiously optimistic. In this regional economic outlook roundtable, experts discussed how the area's travel and tourism industry has handled the economic storm, including the growth of international tourism. Experts also discussed diversifying the economy, education trends and residential and commercial real estate.

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How has the economy impacted the area's travel and tourism industry?

WHEATON: Last year, we certainly saw a dip in skier days from our sixth record year in a row prior to that. This year we wanted to take a pretty conservative approach as far as our business planning went, so we budgeted for about a 5 percent increase both in skier days and in total pre-tax profit. And encouragingly, we passed that percent this past year, and a lot of that had to do with early season conditions. Some preliminary reports say that nationally this was the second-best ski year ever, which was very surprising to a lot of us. And what the ski industry saw nationally was that people were still considering recreation very high on their family agenda, but what they were also seeing was that destination resorts in particular saw a smaller piece of that skier-day pie than in previous years. Utah is looking at being up over last year about 1.5 percent. And collectively, the three resorts here in Park City--Deer Valley, Park City Mountain Resort and The Canyons--saw about a 5.6 percent increase over last year. So what that tells us is that the Park City and Summit County areas saw a larger percentage of Utah ski business than in the prior year. So for us as a local business, it's been good. The forecast is good. We saw some good numbers last year and encouragingly reservations for next year also are already very strong.

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Particularly at Deer Valley, the season we had was a good one for us in that we didn't necessarily have a lot of natural snow early on. But we have a pretty substantial snow-making system, and ski conditions were absolutely outstanding even though we didn't have a lot of natural snow. So we were able to make a ton of snow and a lot of the skiers came to us.

OLSEN: We had a better year than we had anticipated and it also was up substantially over last year, probably about a 7 or 8 percent increase in occupancy, although we did have to give away rates to get that occupancy. But the good thing is people are traveling again. The biggest impact we had in the past was with the group segment. We didn't have a lot of groups with the AIG effect taking place here in Park City/Deer Valley where groups were hesitant to come even though they had come in the past. We were most impacted by that group base that did not show in the last year, but it started to come back again this year. So we saw some improvement across the board with the individual skiers as well as the group segment returning to a destination resort like they did this year. And the forecast for the future is quite bright. We see our summer business is up over last year. And we see reservations for next year are improving and ahead of the pace we saw last year. So the clouds are clearing. We are cautiously optimistic, but I think we started over at a new base this year where the rates are down--the occupancy is solid, but the rates are down, and it's going to take a long time for those rates to come back. We are actually predicting that it's probably going to be three to five years before we see the rate increases. Some of that has to do with the new inventories that have come, the St. Regis this past year as well as Montage here next year. Those developments will increase the number of room base we have. But we anticipate that the demand will increase as those rooms come online too.

HATZFELD: I think with additional room inventories, it's great news to see that we were all sold out during the days when we were expected to be sold out. Because we're [St. Regis] new to the market, I have no history, but I'm quite satisfied with the rates we achieved as it relates to this past season and also the occupancy level. I think we have opportunity and we're very optimistic to capitalize on what we achieved this year for next season. We did see an incredible push at the end of March for the spring break vacations and I think that was really nice to see. I think that has to do with the snow conditions we had and the base. So overall we're very optimistic. The summer months look good for us, and I think there is an opportunity for lodging, to see how we may potentially grow that base, because the summer months are still a little undiscovered for this incredible destination. We've definitely seen an increase in corporate people traveling, so we're happy about that. We have not seen it as condensed here in Park City, but we do hope we'll get more new businesses to visit this destination.

BATT: As far as our hotel, we had a great first quarter and we exceeded our expectations. Similar to the St. Regis, the last part of March and the first part of April were excellent. We saw huge increases in international the last part of March, the last part of the ski season, which was exciting. Summer is looking to come around, but it's very slow in coming around. We're finding that a lot of the group and transient business is still very short-term. But we are cautiously optimistic and hope that it will continue to bring in room nights. Unfortunately, we are sacrificing some rate as well to get the occupancy.

OLSEN: The one thing that I think everybody in the lodging industry was concerned about was the inventory increases with the addition of the St. Regis and the Montage. We were all concerned that there would not be enough demand. But I think the demand has actually increased at a higher rate than the inventory. So we were pleased with that. I think everybody was sold out during the Christmas holiday period, President's Day, Sundance and spring break, and it was a pleasant surprise that we didn't see any dip in demand during that period. We actually filled in the entire inventory nicely.

FULLER: I'd agree that this past ski season was good, but I wouldn't say it was great. It didn't really meet our expectations, but considering we are not in Park City/Deer Valley, with that ski market, we did well. We are also optimistic moving forward going into the summer months, especially with one of our main facilities and our conference center. The conference business is starting to build again. A lot of the companies we saw that completely pulled out all their conferences are now starting to come back and book their conferences again, which is...