Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[T]he way Megan Smith sees it, she had a very productive week in Australia last month.
And why not? February is a good time to visit Australia. It’s summer down there, with temperatures usually in the 70-to-80 degree range, though Smith said it felt more like a Vermont September than July.
But no matter. She wasn’t there for fun. She was working. For you. She visited three cities, talked to a lot of people, and stood behind tables filled with brochures about what a great place Vermont is.
All in the interest of Vermont’s economy. It’s “tourism as economic development,” she said.
Smith was not Down Under as a tourist. She is the commissioner of the Department of Tourism and Marketing (T&M), an eight-person state agency that spends about $3.7 million a year (down from some $7 million several years ago) to get people to come to Vermont to have fun.
And spend money while doing it. Stay in hotels and resorts, eat in restaurants, fill the tanks of their rental cars, buy hunting or fishing licenses, pay the golf course green fees and the ski run lift tickets, get tchotchkes at all those country stores.
Vermonters should be glad they do. As calculated by the Agency of Commerce and Community Development (that’s T&Ms parent agency), something like 30,000 Vermont jobs, or about 8 percent of the total, exist because of the $2.49 billion brought into the state by vacationers and vacation homeowners.
So it makes sense for a state official to schlepp the 10,000 miles to Sydney to try to attract more Aussies to ski, hike, sleep and eat in Vermont.
Or does it?
A cynic, a skeptic, or even just a skinflint, might raise some questions here. A state employee, on the taxpayer’s dime, spends more than 40 hours on round-trip flights and some $2,000 on airfare, plus seven nights in hotels to go urge people who live … well 10,000 miles and $2,000 in airfare away to vacation in Vermont.
How many Australians are going to make that trip? And how much did Smith’s visit cost Vermont taxpayers?
And anyway, isn’t this a public subsidy for private, for-profit businesses? Why can’t the businesses finance their own promotional tours?
Well, to begin with, some Australians do vacation in Vermont. In 2011, according to one estimate, 78,000 non-Canadian foreigners vacationed in Vermont, so it’s not unlikely that some of them were Aussies. Coming all that way, they probably stay longer than many other visitors, making it worthwhile to solicit their business.
And the trip didn’t directly cost Vermonters anything. Smith said she spent $5,000. A little more than $2,000 of that was for airfare, she said, including flights from one Australian city to another. Hotels cost her another $1,000 and she spent about $500 for food and taxis.
The money came from Discover New England, the regional tourism promotion organization to which all the New England states belong. Vermont pays $170,000 a year for its membership in Discover New England.
Smith said tourism is worth all that and much more for Vermont’s economy, and that without the promotion her department provides, many fewer visitors would come to Vermont.
Not everyone agrees. In a recent report to the Senate Economic Development and House Commerce Committees, economist Tom Kavet noted that “there is no positive statistical correlation” between T&M’s marketing and revenues from the Rooms and Meals tax. “Since 2005, T&M expenditures have dropped 38 percent while Meal and Rooms revenues have increased by 26 percent,” Kavet said, suggesting that the state’s tourism industry might do just as well if T&M ceased to exist.
Not so, said Smith. She agreed that the tax revenues were rising, but only because the prices of hotel rooms and restaurant meals are higher. The trend line for the number of individual tourists, she said, has been “flat.”
That’s not certain. An examination of data provided by the Vermont Tourism Research Center at the University of Vermont indicates that the number of out-of-state tourists grew from 8.9 million in 2003 to slightly more than 10 million in 2011. And the director of the center, Lisa Chase, said the models used to measure tourism statistics had been changed over the years, making comparisons fuzzy.
“If only we had a turnstile, going ‘ching, ching, ching’ every time someone entered the state,” she said. Instead, researchers keep trying to find the best way to estimate the number of visitors. Greg Gerdel, T&M’s chief researcher, said even those 2003-2011 figures might be uncertain because some of the more than 2 million Canadians who entered Vermont in those years might just have been passing through.
Tourism, it turns out, doesn’t just happen. People have to be cajoled and persuaded.
What does seem to be certain is that if no one promoted Vermont tourism at all, the state would lose business to the states that do promote it, which is just about all of them. Tourism, it turns out, doesn’t just happen. People have to be cajoled and persuaded. Or as Dave Blanford, the spokesman for the new, privately financed Tourism Alliance in Washington state put it, “you can’t assume tourism.”
This appears to be especially true when it comes to attracting overseas tourists, who rarely pick up the phone or go online to buy a plane ticket and make a hotel reservation. Mostly, they book their trips through tour operators. So Smith wasn’t just appealing to random Australians-on-the-street during her week there. Hers was a much more targeted effort to sell Vermont to tour operators.
Were the state to get out of the tourist promotion business, it might be considered an act of unilateral disarmament. Almost every state has such an agency. Tourism, Smith said, depends on a “a collection of networks,” and the individual businesses, especially the smaller ones, “can’t go in it alone.”
That’s her constituency, she said. She was not in Australia on behalf of the big ski resorts or lodges, which she said “can carry their own” burden of promoting themselves.
Her efforts, she said, help “the little tiny businesses. That’s who we work for.”
But couldn’t even those businesses together mount their own promotional campaign, even maybe sending someone to Australia every few years? If promotion is so vital to businesses that cater to tourists, every one of those businesses – and Smith said there are more than a hundred of them – must spend some money on promotion. It’s hard to see how they could not support their own association.
That’s what’s happening in Washington state, where the Legislature, Dave Blanford said, “recently closed the state-funded tourism office.” The hotels, restaurants, resorts and gift shops quickly formed the Washington State Tourism Alliance to handle promotion “at no cost to the state.”
Blanford said that in the meanwhile tourism in the state has not collapsed. Like everything else, he said, tourism there was “riding a national trend,” and doing better as the economy improved (and perhaps, though he did not say this, after the state legalized recreational marijuana). Still, he reasonably worried that business could suffer if no one promoted tourism there while its neighbors were actively marketing their states.
Vermont tourist businesses have associations. But so far they have not offered to take on the entire burden of promoting themselves.
Why should they, as long as the taxpayers are doing it for them?
