Tourism rides currents of change.

• Author: Kleeschulte, Chuck
• Position: Alaska

Tourism Rides Currents of Change

ALASKA'S TOURISM INDUSTRY during the 1980s floated merrily along on a comfortable state-funded advertising campaign averaging 3-10 percent increases in visitor counts most every year. Fueled by growing cruise ship arrivals and rising numbers of package-tour participants and independent travelers, tourism bobbed along on the ever-rising crest. Take Bob Dindinger, for example.

Dindinger, a former state tourism official, early last decade left his government post and started Alaska Travel Adventures, a firm that offers a host of tours statewide. Its first and still largest attraction is offering visitors to Juneau - predominately cruise ship passengers - a raft trip down the relatively tame Mendenhall River.

During the decade business boomed, and by last summer, more than 16,000 visitors were donning rubber boots and plastic rain ponchos. They enjoyed a unique view of Juneau's Mendenhall Glacier from its lake, as well as other Southeast Alaska scenery, and snacked on salmon on a sandbar along the way.

"The growth in the business has been good and steady. Let's just hope things remain that way," Dindinger said last year.

For his firm and for all other businesses that profit from cruise ship, air and road travelers, 1990 promises to be another good year. But there is growing concern over what the long-term offers - a continuing flood of visitors to Alaska or a slowing of the state's current tour bounty, in part because of the relative drop in state advertising support for Alaska's second largest employment industry.

View Behind. "There is no question that Alaska, given all the bad things that happened to us last year, fared very well," says Karen Cowart, executive director of the Alaska Visitors Association (AVA). The umbrella group represents the state's tour operators, fish and wilderness lodges, gas station owners, cafe proprietors and hotel and transportation firms making their livings from

"Between the whale rescue, the cold spell and the oil spill, we couldn't have gotten much worse publicity, and we still managed to hold our own and actually have an increase in visitors. That's the mark of a good year," she explains.

Dana Brockway, director of the state's Division of Tourism, characterizes 1989 as a great tourism year for Alaska - if not for every region of the state - given the negative publicity generated by the March 24, 1989, grounding of the tanker Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound and the flood of news stories on the effects of the resulting nearly 11-million-gallon oil spill.

"Last year was very steady, slightly better than 1988 in visitor counts. When you remember all the adversity that affected the state, it was a good year," says Brockway.

As of February, preliminary estimates placed the state's rise in tourists in 1989 between 2 and 3 percent. That would mean roughly an additional 20,000 tourists visited the state last summer - about 750,000 from June 1 to the end of September.

In Southeast, cruise ship travel actually fell slightly in 1989, mostly a result of the 1988 bankruptcy of Exploration Cruise Lines. Between the loss of the Seattle carrier's four main ships and several changes in other schedules, such as Cunard Lines' pullout from Alaska trade, only 16 large ships called in Ketchikan and Juneau last summer - down from 21 in 1988.

The more-than-40-visit drop in sailings, to 227 to Juneau last summer, caused total cruise ship visitation to the Panhandle to fall by about 9,000 tourists. According to estimates by the Juneau Convention and Visitors Bureau based on U.S. Customs Service data, 193,777 tourists visited Juneau last summer - the most frequented cruise stop in the state - compared to 202,130 the year before.

Visitor arrivals via the Alaska Marine Highway System also were down slightly. A major...