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Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 12:20:09 :
In Reply to: the snow ball effect posted by copey on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 07:44:31 :
There are a lot of businesses here that are primarily dependent on tourists, especially the Sierra Silver Mine Tour that I'm involved with. We haven't seen any big change this year. With an attraction like this, which is something people do "along the way" rather than as the whole point of their trip, I tend to think that for everybody who stays home because they can't afford to travel, there's somebody else who decides to take a shorter, cheaper trip, closer to home rather than fly to Florida or some foreign country. Maybe they live in Portland or Seattle and they decide to drive to Yellowstone and camp rather than fly to Hawaii or Mazatlan and stay in a resort. I-90 goes right through Wallace. It's the only freeway between the coast and points East north of Salt Lake and it's an easy day's drive from the coast. I do notice we have more German tourists, and some other Europeans, this year no doubt due to the devaluation of the US dollar.
Tourism is a funny business. I don't fully trust it myself, but for 30 years we've had all the economic development promoters saying everybody should embrace tourism because it's "clean industry". I'm not so sure it's all that clean. You clear-cut a mountainside and it looks like hell, but eventually the trees grow back. You clear-cut a mountainside and then put roads, condos, golf-courses, and ski chalets all over it and it never grows back, and the runoff from the pavement and the sewage pollutes the creeks forever. Everybody also seemed to think that unlike the "extractive industries" (fancy words for logging and mining), tourism "isn't cyclical". That just makes no sense at all. If people are hard up, the first thing they'll quit spending money on is vacations.
The other thing with tourism is that what's popular changes. 120 years ago, people wanted to take a train to a huge and formal hotel in the wilderness somewhere. By the '20s, when cars became common, they liked to go to hot springs resorts and take the waters for their health. After WWII, families with kids liked to stay at a cabin by a lake or a motel on the beach, do a little fishing, and let the kids play. Hot springs have come back to life as new age "healing centers", but now water parks are the popular thing, along with other amusement parks, but few people want to stay in one place for a whole week. Tour buses are diminishing, which we're really seeing here. Only the old people go on bus tours any more. The boomers, even the older ones, want nothing to do with them. "Cultural tourism" is popular with boomers, and that's what we provide at the mine tour. "Cultural tourism" is the industry buzz-word for going to learn something about the local culture and history of a place.
I think it's probably fair to say that any tourism activity that depends on people burning up lots of fuel is going to be severely diminished this year. There's nothing more wasteful of fuel than zooming around a lake in a power boat, so it's no surprise that the places that are dependent on that are going to be hurting. I'm also curious if people are going to be driving thousands of miles in giant RVs any more. I wouldn't want to be an RV or boat dealer now. Around here we have lots of people who come from hundreds of miles away (probably not 1000 miles, though) to ride ATVs in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter. The amount of fuel the toys burn up is probably insignificant, but the amount of fuel their hauler rigs burn up might be. There were definitely not as many snowmobiles out last winter as in the past, but that could have just been that with so much snow all over the northwest, they didn't have to come this far to find some.
Ultimately, the economic development types need to see that tourism is just one sort of industry, not the be-all end-all that should drive out everything else. The lesson of the past isn't that "resource" industries are bad, it's that relying on any one industry is bad. I remember the "Boeing recession" in Seattle when the canceled the SST. The way to keep a local economy going is to not get dependent on any one thing. Some towns nowadays are just as dependent on tourism as the logging, mining, or factory towns were on their one industry (and sometimes one company) 30 years ago. That's never a good situation.