Tourism is becoming an increasingly important part of Wyoming’s economy.
Cody has the benefit of attracting tourists headed to Yellowstone National Park, but it hasn’t kept up with other gateway towns.
For decades, the county’s tourism agency marketed dude ranch vacations, the local rodeo and the area’s cowboy history. But lately, the Park County Travel Council has highlighted more outdoors experiences. It’s a shift backed by millions of local lodging tax dollars, but it's drawn some skepticism from some locals.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Olivia Weitz spoke with Park County Travel Council Executive Director Ryan Hauck, who’s been heading the effort, about how the marketing shift has been going.
Editor's Note: This story has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Olivia Weitz: Ryan, I wanted to ask you: What's something special about Park County that sets it apart? What's something unique that you can do when you come here?
Ryan Hauck: What really blew me away when I came here is the outdoors – that we have 80 percent public lands. The fishing here is insane year-round. The hiking is unlimited. The forest is called the “horse forest” because it has the most equestrian trails than anywhere else in the country.
Snowmobiling is not just the best for the area. It's some of the best in the country.
No place that I've ever lived or even visited has the amount of world class outdoor recreation than what we have here.
OW: For a lot of years, Park County advertised itself as the place where you could get the authentic Western experience. We're talking dude ranches, history museums, that kind of thing. You're taking a different tack with your marketing strategy. Explain to us what kind of tourists you're trying to get to come to Cody Yellowstone.
RH: We still promote our authentic Western experiences kind of at the forefront, but you're a hundred percent right. We definitely have kind of a secondary scheme to our marketing with our outdoor recreation and specifically trying to hit that millennial market a little bit harder than what we have in the past.
Obviously, the boomer market has been great for us for years. To this day, they're still the ones that spend the most money when they come here, which is always great. But as that market starts to age out and we start to see new travelers come through looking for more of those experiential type things, we want to make sure that we're appealing to that market and enticing them to come here.
OW: You talked about that older audience that typically comes to Cody. Obviously they're aging, but tell us more about why this shift towards showcasing the county in a more outdoorsy way.
RH: We don't just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. We use something called Zartico. It's a mobile tracking platform and that showcases that people's number one reason they want to come here is not even Yellowstone most months. It actually is all of our outdoor recreation.
It could be wildlife watching from their windows. It could be fishing. It could be going on hikes. It could be kind of what I call lunch loops. Something that you could do in a couple hours, straight from town here.
OW: I talked to Jennifer Thoma at the Chamber [of Commerce]. She says there's some confusion among locals about this update in marketing to include more of the outdoors part and the recreation part in the strategy besides the history and dude ranches. She says that she'd like to see more transparency and local involvement in shaping these campaigns. And I just wanted to give you a chance to respond to that.
RH: What's tough for us is that our target is not locals. And so everything we do campaign-wise and all this work we do, locals never get to see it, unfortunately, because obviously we're trying to push this stuff out to non-residents.
I agree with her, and it's stuff that the [Park County Travel Council] board and I have talked about as well in the past. I know we are going to be putting together a local PR strategy that really just might show up in the form of an editorial in the Cody Enterprise, Powell Tribune and maybe with Janet Jones and her Cody Journal as well.
OW: What do you think people are most confused about?
RH: I think it's really what our office does. Some people say, ‘We're the east gate of Yellowstone. People are going to come no matter what. We don't need to do any marketing. It might dip down a little bit, but I think what we have is good enough to get people here.’
Or, ‘We don't need tourism.’ I hear that sometimes, too. ‘We don't need tourism. We have plenty of stuff just that our locals can support.’
So I think it's educating people what we do – how does it affect who is coming here and how they're coming here? There's some very popular examples out there of people having that same sentiment. [In] other destinations, the DMO [destination marketing organization, similar to the Park County Travel Council] got voted out and that next year is atrocious.
They lost that marketing arm and they saw massive, massive dips. Typically when a DMO gets voted out, the next year typically the lodging tax will pass by 80 to 90 percent because locals will see the effect immediately.
Now, why that's bad is because to get that organization back, not only do they now have to play catch up, but they'd have to get you back up to snuff where everybody else is at. And so you lose years and years of progress just based off of that one year's decision.
OW: In recent years, tourism to other gateway towns has really taken off. I think of Bozeman, Jackson, West Yellowstone.
I looked at some visitor spending numbers and I saw that visitor spending in Gallatin County, Montana, that includes Bozeman and West Yellowstone. They recently exceeded a billion dollars annually in outside visitor spending. That's what people are spending on restaurants, hotels, et cetera. Ten years ago, they were about $160 million more than where Park County was for 2023 numbers. In 2014, they were $662 million. Park County last year [in 2023] was $507 million.
Teton County, where Jackson is, they're getting close to $2 billion in annual visitor spending. Looking back the last decade, theirs has gone up 80 percent. Park County has increased by 37 percent.
So obviously some increases in Park County, but not to the extent that some of these other Yellowstone gateways are seeing. I wanted to get your take on why that might be.
RH: You have to look at the cost of the things that visitors spend money on. So for example, you brought up Jackson. Do you know what the average hotel is in Jackson? It’s over double of what ours is. You have to look at what visitors spend money on to really put those numbers in retrospect of what you're actually seeing.
OW: Obviously going out to dinner costs more in Jackson, but are there any other reasons why? I know that you've only been in this role for three years, I'm talking numbers from the past decade.
RH: What somebody did before I was in this role is a tough thing to answer. It was a different board. It was a different director. I really couldn't tell you what their scheme was back way before I got here. But I can tell you post-COVID since I've taken over in 2021, we've seen 807,000 overnight visitors in ’21, to 984,000 in 2023.
We see millions of dollars coming here, increasing every single year since 2021. It’s been not just organic growth. It's been expedited growth over the past three and a half, four years for us. I think we actually have a lot going on.
The way that these other destinations have grown compared to the way that we have grown might affect some of that visitor spending. Obviously, you see Bozeman with all their air service that they have and the diversification of the businesses that are popping up there, with tech and medical and everything else.
OW: I interviewed the director of the airport here and he says there's a study underway to look at how Cody Yellowstone might be able to snag some visitors who are flying into Billings or Bozeman, and get them to fly in here or drive here instead of go there. I'm just curious, is that feasible? What might that look like?
RH: That’s called the leakage study. We have a consultant working on that and I say ours that's kind of like ours and the community’s. Really [it’s] going to see: How much are we losing to Bozeman? How much are we losing to Billings? How many locals, even, are choosing to not fly 10 minutes from their front door and thinking that Billings or Denver or anybody else as a better option for them?
I think it's going to help us quite a bit. It's definitely going to be a great stepping stone for us to know that number and know why we're losing them, as well.
The other part to that, too, that we're really focusing on is CYAIR, which is the Cody Yellowstone Air Improvement Organization that I'm also on the board for. A big thing that we're doing is we are pushing for more air service to come through here.
Our goal would be to get back Delta operating through SkyWest to Salt Lake City.
OW: I'm wondering how will you know if this branding shift is successful and what will that look like for the public?
RH: I already know. It's been running for about three and a half years. I think a marketing campaign, for it to truly see if it is going to be successful, it needs about a year or two under its belt to see if it's moving the needle. Now we've had a few years of this thing happening – 807,000 visitors in 2021, to 980,000 overnight visitors in 2023.
It's working. Our destination is, like I mentioned before, really running on all cylinders. Our destination sentiment is there. Our campaign is working. Our website visits have gone up through the roof. Our SEO [search engine optimization], our SEM [search engine marketing], our regional and national – everything is working right now. We are looking forward to continued success. Ready to keep this thing going.
OW: Earlier we talked a little bit about the overall visitor spending, how much people are spending when they come here. Is that something that you're going to be looking at and evaluating as you evaluate the success of these campaigns?
RH: Yeah, for sure. This year specifically was a little bit tough, economy was bad this year. And then just historically, presidential election years are always a low spend year, just the way that it typically goes. That's not just for tourism. That's oil and gas, that's tech, that's really anybody. And so now that we are past the election, we're back to real life again. I think we will see a great year coming up.
OW: It sounds like you're feeling optimistic.
RH: I am. It should be a really good year.
