Wyoming tourism off to a strong start in 2013

Wyoming is seeing more hotel bookings and travelers who stop at welcome or visitor’s centers, state travel and tourism director Diane Shober said.

Wyoming is seeing more hotel bookings and travelers who stop at welcome or visitor’s centers, state travel and tourism director Diane Shober said. Those are considered the two best indicators of overall tourist activity.

Wyoming is a state in the mountain region of the Western United States. Wyoming is the 10th most extensive, but the least populous and the second least densely populated of the 50 United States. The western two thirds of the state is covered mostly with the mountain ranges and rangelands in the foothills of the Eastern Rocky Mountains, while the eastern third of the state is high elevation prairie known as the High Plains. Cheyenne is the capital and the most populous city of Wyoming with a population of nearly 60,000 people within its city proper.

The Yellowstone National Park is one of the major tourism attractions.

Since April, hotel bookings in Campbell County have been on the rise, which is a good sign for the tourism business, said Mary Silvernell, Campbell County Convention and Visitors Bureau executive director.

Wyoming is having a strong year for tourism, with visitors expected to surpass last year’s mark of 8 million.

Wyoming’s tourism fell off sharply in 2009 after the recession but has been climbing back.

Last year, about 1,000 people stopped in at the Wright Visitor Center all year. Just last month, 1,200 people paid the new center a visit. The Gillette Visitor Center is seeing increases as well, although not quite as dramatic.

Last June, the total visitors for Wright and Gillette’s centers was 2,605. This June, 2,600 visited Gillette’s center alone.

Silvernell said much of that increase in Wright is likely due to the new Visitor Center that opened in May. The bathrooms and visitor center used to be in separate buildings, but now people have to pass the office on their way to the bathroom.

“That, and the new design makes people want to go in there,” Silvernell said.

Between the RV rallies and events like the Donkey Creek Festival, Silvernell said Campbell County is seeing a lot of out-of-town traffic this summer, which bodes well for year-end totals.

“We are very, very hopeful. We ended last year about 5 percent under what we had budgeted for as far as lodging tax revenue, but a lot of that we can attribute to the Wright hotels that are full, but they have a lot of long-term stays,” Silvernell said.

In 2012, travel spending in Wyoming totaled $3.1 billion, driven by more than 8 million visitors, an increase of 4 percent over 2011, according to figures from Dean Runyan Associates, an economic and market research organization.

Slightly more than half of all accommodations in the state are in Park and Teton counties. Tourism is a major driving force in Teton County, Shober said, and it’s a large percentage of the economy in Park County, as well.

“Reservations and bookings at Yellowstone Park are up slightly this year over last and that’s good news for the two counties and suggests a promising summer,” Shober said in an interview last week.

The number of travelers stopping at visitors centers across the state is up 25 percent over a year ago, she said.

The Cheyenne visitor’s center pulled in about 1,000 visitors a week at its old location in south Cheyenne. At its new location, the renamed High Plains Visitors Welcome Center averaged more than 5,000 visitors per week in June, Shober said.

A new state tourism promotion involves stickers depicting various iconic landmarks, such as the Grand Tetons or Devils Tower. The centers can give the stickers to visitors.

In southwest Wyoming, the visitor’s center at Green River has a flyer for visitors advising them of the free stickers. So far the center has given out about 50 stickers, said Rebecca Briesmaster, director of the Green River Chamber of Commerce.

The center is seeing between 1,500 and 2,000 tourists a month, which is about the same number as last summer.

The National Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper also is reporting a busy summer.

The trails center is not affiliated with the Wyoming tourism agency. Instead, it is a cooperative partnership between the federal Bureau of Land Management, the National Historic Trails Center Foundations and the city of Casper.

“We’ve been busy, we have folks from all over,” Stacy Moore, a center staffer, said.

More information on Wyoming tourism can be found on www.wyomingtourism.org/

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Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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