John Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.
[I]n 2013, the last time the figures were compiled, 5.5 million people from other states came to Vermont as tourists.
That’s a lot of people, but not as many as in 2011 (the state collects these data every other year) or 2009, and not nearly as many as the 7.5 million tourists who came to the state in 2007, before the Great Recession.
So is Vermont attracting fewer visitors than in the past?
“Maybe,” said Kenneth Jones, who knows whereof he speaks. As an economist and research analyst for the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, Jones compiled the most recent set of figures, so he knows how it’s done.
Nobody actually counts all the tourists. The state does not employ people to sit in the airports and Amtrak stations or post themselves at every highway entering the state to count the arrivals and ask whether they are tourists or business travelers, staying in Vermont, or just passing through.
The numbers are estimates based on models, and the last three estimates, Jones said, were based on models by three different researchers. In other words, the figures from the last few efforts are not precisely comparable even if some comparison is inevitable.
Still, Jones does not dispute what seems to be the obvious point, even if he questions how obvious it is.
“My conclusion is things are pretty flat in terms of numbers,” he said. Maybe Vermont isn’t actually drawing fewer tourists than it was a few years ago, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be attracting more of them.
So is the state doing something “wrong,” or somehow failing to appeal to enough people? In neighboring New Hampshire, “tourism activity has been on the rise in recent years since the Great Recession,” according to an email from Daniel Lee, an associate professor of economics at Plymouth State University.
But Jones noted that the two states are not all that comparable. Tourism in New Hampshire, where there are fewer ski areas, is largely a summer enterprise. Besides, that state has more developed tourist attractions, such as all those time-share condos around Lake Winnipesaukee.
Still, in a state whose economy is substantially (and perhaps increasingly?) dependant on tourism, a fall-off of visitors could be a problem one day. Vermont businesses – not just the hotels and restaurants, but also the shops, convenience stores and gas stations – need all those flatlanders coming to the state and spending their money. And Vermont’s state treasury needs the revenue those outsiders pay in rooms and meals taxes.
So far, according to Greg Gerdel, the chief of research and operations for the Department of Tourism and Marketing, “those revenues have grown quite steadily from the depths of the recession,” which is one reason state tourism officials are not “significantly alarmed” about those figures showing no growth in overall visits. The most recent data from the Agency of Administration showed that the state had collected $27.69 million in rooms and meals taxes through August, up from $26.84 million in 2014. Gerdel said out-of-staters account for roughly 90 percent of the rooms tax take and about half the restaurant share.
Which seems to mean that while fewer people (or at least no more people) are visiting Vermont, those who do come spend more money.
Jones thinks that’s because they have more money.
“Because there’s more affluence among the travelers, the money (rooms and meals tax revenue) has gone up” even as the number of visitors does not.
It figures. Most of Vermont’s tourists come from nearby states. The population of the Northeastern states is aging, and older people tend to have more leisure time and more money.
And in the entire country, income is becoming more inequitably distributed. No mystery, then, that the fewer people who have money to spare have more of it, so they stay in more expensive hotels, while the many people who have less money to spare stay home. One possible result: fewer weekend trips to mid-priced hotels by middle-income folks, more 10-day stays in luxury hotels by those who can afford it.
This is also consistent with another one of Ken Jones’ interesting findings: an increasing share of the out-of-staters who vacation in Vermont are owners of second homes in the state.
Despite rising property taxes, regulations that some claim discourage home-buying, and the new wind and solar power projects popping up on (cluttering?) the countryside, the “numbers of second-home owners is increasing,” Jones said, and they are in increasing proportion of all residential properties in Vermont.
Speaking of wind and solar projects, there appears to be no evidence to support the suggestion that they are responsible for any decline in the number of visitors to the state. If they were, one might suspect fewer visitors to Crystal Lake State Park in Barton, from which the 16 420-foot towers of the Sheffield wind project are clearly visible across the lake.
But statistics from the Department of Parks, Forests and Recreation show that visits to the park (many of them by Vermont residents) have continued to rise (with a dip in 2013), as has use of most of the state parks, according to Parks Director Craig Whipple.
Jones said tourism’s importance to the state transcends the rooms and meals revenue and employment at tourist attractions, which has also been going up in recent years. Tourism turns out to be the second biggest reason people decide to move to Vermont, behind only higher education. Two-thirds of all college students in Vermont (mostly at private colleges, of course), a higher percentage than in any other state, come from out of state, he said. Many of those students like Vermont, and decide to stay.
But tourism is next, Jones said. People come for vacation, and decide to live here. Many of them first become second-home owners, then as they retire (or semi-retire) make their second home their home. That’s why, he said, “keeping an eye on tourism is so important.”
The Department of Tourism and Marketing spends about $3.7 million a year to keep the tourists coming, but no one can predict the future. A key question for tourist promoters all over the country, Jones said, is trying to figure out “what the Millennials will do.”
That much-discussed generation – people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s – are often thought to prefer unconventional recreations, individual and idiosyncratic rather than organized and traditional.
If so, here’s a thought: among Vermont’s other superlative accomplishments (or perhaps just peculiarities), Jones said, is that it has a “way higher percentage of visual artists and art galleries than most other states.”
So, he said, if your idea of fun is to wander around a country town or rural village and stumble on an art gallery, Vermont may be just the place for you.
Now he and his colleagues just need to figure out how to get that message across.
