Travel & tourism.

• Position: Industry Outlook - Interview

Utah's tourism industry is looking to capitalize on a strong summer season and continue building momentum into this year. Part of that effort is a push for renewed investments in marketing, in hotel and convention infrastructure, and in new attractions and events. The state's tourism leaders say our product offerings are world class--but we need to find new ways to get the attention, and the pocketbooks, of international travelers.

We'd like to give a special thank you to Mark White, vice president of sales for Visit; Salt Lake, for moderating the discussion.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

How would you describe the state of our industry?

ANDERSON: Cautiously optimistic. This year things are actually turning around. We are seeing higher tax revenues. We're seeing slow but very steady growth and, again, back on that pat phrase, "cautious optimism."

WILLIAMS: Were hearing from our partners that they had a great summer, generally. We know numbers are up in Park City over the summer. They are up in Moab and we had a great ski season last season. So cautiously optimistic is very fair to say.

RAFFERTY: Last year was really, really good. The state and the ski industry had our second-best year ever last year, and that says a lot about tourism in an economy in which a lot of people are struggling. And nationwide, the ski industry had the best season ever on record last year;

Were off to a slowish start this year snowwise, but actually Christmas has been really good and in some cases better than last year. Christmas is booked on last years snow--so those were already on the books and were at a pivotal time right now.

For the ski industry its tricky because youVe got X amount of time to make your hay and whatever you lose on the front end, you don't have the luxury of making it up on the back end. It just doesn't work that way. But I think we're still going to have a better season than you might expect.

WILKINSON: I believe the numbers at

Temple Square have been up this year; at least for Temple Square Hospitality, the numbers are up. There is a great deal of interest because Salt Lake was selected by the national tour operators as the number one faith-based tourism spot in the world, which is really quite significant

We believe that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is a wonderful draw, and then youVe got the genealogical community that really bolsters that, and Temple Square clicks through a lot of visitors. So we feel that this new7, up-and-coming portion of tourism-- Faith-based tourism--has got some legs and is actually going to take off a little bit.

JOHNSON: In the hotel industry, there are a lot of parts of the state that had a great year in 2011 and are pacing very well for 2012 bookings. Throughout Southern Utah, around the national parks, they had a great year last year, and many of them had the best year they've ever had. So they are looking to build on that in 2012 by potentially increasing rates. There have not been a lot of new rooms built in those areas. So with additional bookings, they are able to move the rate up a bit, which is exactly what they'd like to do.

BECK: If you look at the number of destinations that were down year over year between 2008 and 2009, it was virtually every county that reported through the Governors Office of Budget and Planning--I think only three counties were not down. If you look at 2009 and 2010, there were only three counties that were down. Almost every county had increases in travel.

The segment for which we have seen enormous strength in the last 11 to 14 months and the market that we think creates optimism--and not just cautious optimism--for us in Salt: Lake is the corporate meetings market. The corporate travel that is going on right now has been huge in our market. We looked at 2011 as potentially being 4 to 4.5 percent up over 2010, and we just got our final numbers and we are 8.4 percent up over 2010 in transient room tax. On the strength of corporate travel, restaurant revenues in Salt Lake County are up year over year and rental car revenues are up double-digit year over year.

Utah's economy is what drives that corporate travel, and not just the corporate meetings travel but the corporate transient travel. Some of our biggest hotels in Salt Lake, their bread and butter is really in that corporate transient market--that individual businessman who has the laptop in his backpack over his shoulder and has a suitcase on wheels and was in Los Angeles two nights ago, is in Salt Lake tonight, and is going to be in Denver the next night. That market really came back, and so that level of increase that we saw year over year has us really feeling optimistic.

And if you look at our convention business as a canary in a coal mine in terms of how that business travel is going to keep going, we saw increases in virtually every one of our conventions this year. That is a real good indicator for us that people are feeling better about their jobs and they are spending that money to come and travel.

So I'm going to drop the "cautious!" We are optimistic. We are not euphorically optimistic, but we are optimistic that we have clearly hit the bottom, where in '10 we still were going down, wondering where the bottom of the pool was and wiggling our toes. And in ' 11, we felt the bottom and we were able to push off and come up really strong. We have every sense that 2012 is going to continue to grow, particularly in areas related to the strength of the corporate market.

Looking beyond the immediate Wasatch Front, how is the year shaping up?

MALONE: Park City had a very, very strong summer. Our summer business was up significantly. We came out of the summer thinking that we were going to knock them dead this winter, and we had a very, very strong holiday season, pretty much on par with last year. Now we're at that critical juncture of waiting for the phones to start ringing again and looking forward to February and March. We had a strong Sundance Film Festival this year. All we need is a little bit of help from Mother Nature and we'll be back on track, moving forward and looking at double-digit increases over last year.

TOLIVER: [Ogden/Weber] didn't see any of those huge fluctuations in our numbers during the down years for some of the smaller destinations. We finished last year about even with 2010 as far as our TRT collections were concerned. Our tourism taxes overall were up but the business was harder to come by, where now our pipeline seems to be more full. We have a lot more on the books going into this year.

We have continued to increase every year. We never had a decrease in our tourism taxes. So we feel very fortunate. That is one of the benefits of still being an undiscovered destination as more and more people come to find us.

HOLLIAN: In 2011 we have had more incentive groups than at any time in our history, and we had more inbound incentives. We've had a number of...