Mt. CB and TAPP try to see eye to eye

Focus on trails coincides with increased visitation, lodging revenues, says TAPP

By Kendra Walker

The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council and the Tourism and Prosperity Partnership (TAPP) met several times this winter and spring to better understand each other and discuss how they can work together.

With TAPP recently taking on a wider focus at the request of the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), including tourism, economic development, Western Colorado University and sustainable tourism, the Town Council members have been vocal in expressing their concern for TAPP’s shared focus between tourism and economic development.

“Personally, I had concerns about the diversification,” said Mt. Crested Butte mayor Janet Farmer. “I would have rather seen it split up into two different groups—one that does the business part and one that does the general marketing. I’m just uncomfortable with the split focus.”

The BOCC acts as the Local Marketing District (LMD) board that allocates collected LMD tax funds to TAPP. TAPP marketing manager Daniel Kreykes explained that the board is following the state’s guidelines to allocate funds to support both economic development and tourism.

“Maybe that’s a conversation that needs to be had [with the board],” said Farmer.

The TAPP team did note that economic development and tourism overlap to some degree, and pointed out that it recruited Mt. Crested Butte-based Blister Review to the valley. Additionally, TAPP’s recently acquired ICELab has worked with four companies based in Mt. Crested Butte: Blister Review, Coffee Lab, Vermont Sticky and Team Prep USA.

With the expanded focus, the Town Council has also been wary of how TAPP’s efforts and usage of budget are actually attributed to visitation in town.

“We continue to spend most of our time and most of our resources on tourism and marketing,” assured TAPP executive director John Norton.

Using data from DestiMetrics, the TAPP team explained that the Gunnison Valley is growing faster in visitation than other areas. And by measuring sales tax data, Telluride recently concluded that the Gunnison Valley was the fastest growing destination over the past five years among areas it considered competitive, including Aspen, Vail, Jackson, Sun Valley and Park City.

“Is TAPP taking responsibility for the increase in visitors in the valley as a whole?” asked council member Roman Kolodziej.

“As it relates to spending, yes,” said Norton, explaining that the history of tourism spending in the valley was relatively flat between 2010 and 2014, and then achieved extraordinary growth in 2015 when TAPP (just called the Tourism Association at the time) changed and narrowed its focus to marketing the valley’s trails. “We’ve been growing faster than anybody else in lodging revenues,” he said.

“It appears that we are having a much stronger summer than others when you look at the DestiMetrics outlook,” continued Norton. “Is it going to be a strong summer? I don’t think so,” but he noted that the valley was doing better than its counterparts for June lodging revenues.

However, marketing hurdles with Crested Butte Mountain Resort have not made it easy over the past year. This past winter CBMR decided to handle its own airline marketing rather than direct $250,000 in funds for TAPP to market air, as it had done in the past. Additionally, CBMR is no longer marketing summer, a decision that was made pre-COVID-19.

“Is that going to be their ongoing attitude, that they’re not going to be marketing summer ever?” asked Farmer.

Norton explained that Vail Resorts has decided company-wide not to market summer. “We’re sorry to see them exit the summer but it’s a Vail global decision so far as we’ve been told, not a Crested Butte-specific one.”

When asked how that would affect TAPP’s budget, Norton replied, “This is the first year of no summer marketing and so we’ve got a bad test year, but if we see we’re really missing that summer money then we take it from winter with the hope and the belief that we couldn’t have a stronger winter marketing partner than Vail Resorts. That they know what they’re doing and know how to attract the right type of people up to the mountain…”

TAPP will continue to focus on marketing trails in the valley this summer and fall, using its CBGTrails app and TrailQuest to enhance the visitor experience and spread people out, gathering visitation intelligence data from the Arrivalist software they use as well as tax collection data.

“Why try to recreate the wheel?” asked Kolodziej, referring to efforts from organizations like the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association and other trail apps that are “far superior” in his opinion.

The TAPP team explained that the CBGTrails app is not meant to compete with other apps. It’s meant to improve the trail data and collaborate with the other apps to better understand the expansive network of trail systems in the valley.

TAPP also hopes to leverage the Arrivalist platform to extrapolate the Mt. Crested Butte lodging revenues and correlate it to TAPP’s marketing efforts, helping to answer council’s return on investment questions in more depth in the future.