The visitor effect: rural Utah communities spruce up to attract tourists.

• Author: Christensen, Lisa
• Position: The Visitor Effect

A few years ago, Uintah County found itself in a tight spot: its dominant industry was floundering, and there wasn't a strong enough secondary industry to take up the slack.

"With the total crash of the oil and gas industry, it was time to diversify," says Lesha Coltharp, director of tourism for Uintah County. While today that temporary tailspin is in the past, the lessons they learned from it aren't. The county has been vigorously building up other sectors to promote a more balanced economy, and one of their brightest stars is promoting tourism to create a more comprehensive visitor economy.

"Tourism will never take the place of oil and gas--there's just not that kind of money generated--but we have a lot of hotel rooms," she says. "It's all to help drive our economy in a downturn of oil and gas, but also make it so when oil and gas do come back, tourism has such a presence that they work hand-in-hand instead of [tourism] falling off."

The visitor economy as a category of industry encompasses tourism like a rectangle as a category encompasses a square--just as all rectangles are squares, not all facets of the visitor economy are tourism. Tourism is a big part of the overall visitor economy, to be sure, but there's more to it than that, says Scott Beck, CEO of Visit Salt Lake.

"On some level, tourism and visitor are synonymous, but I think just from a practical standpoint, when people hear the word 'tourism,' they think 'vacation.' They think leisure travel. The visitor economy is much broader. It includes all reasons for travel: business, visiting friends and family, coming to have medical procedures at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, whatever that may be," he says. "When we talk about numbers and how large the tourism industry is, what we're actually talking about is the visitor economy, the whole enchilada, everything that's involved in it."

In Uintah County, that means the oil and gas industry and the tourism industry are working together for the same goal. Uintah County is currently in the process of building more hotel rooms to accommodate the influx of tourists along with the steady stream of people in town for oil and gas work--Vernal hotels have had an occupancy rate of more than 90 percent 365 days a year. Coltharp says in 2014, the hotel room shortage was such that it damaged tourism, forcing the area to choose one industry or the other rather than helping both to grow.

Now, there are enough rooms and the oil and gas industry has...