Who is the classic Wyoming tourist?

That’s very interesting. We just had our annual research completed… The average age of the visitors is 44.3…, there was a slight increase in the number of 18-24 year olds traveling. Eighty-one percent of our visitors are graduates. They have a fairly high income; they are professionals and they are traveling in groups of 3.3 people. This kind of information … tells us who is coming, when they are coming, how they plan their trip, how they book their trip, what they do when they are here.

The role of our division is to provide an umbrella marketing campaign to draw non-resident visitors to Wyoming. Obviously Yellowstone National Park is the primary destination for most visitors coming in and out of Wyoming, and so the opportunity is to capture them, because they are already here and they are traveling on our highways. To do this we need to work with local communities and destinations to provide information that is exciting and interesting to potential consumers so that when they are planning their trip in and out of Wyoming, they stay longer.

My guess from looking at the website and the things that are promoted there, is that most people are coming here for the natural environment.

You look at this [report] and you’ll see the things that they do, the things that they have experienced on their trip, and they are all related to our attributes. It’s what we promote. You know Wyoming is a great natural outdoor recreation area. We have national parks, national forests, state parks and BLM lands. We have a lot of things to see and do, there’s a great wealth of history here, and cultural history, and especially with baby boomers aging and that whole demographic representing a huge population of potential visitors. Wyoming is, I think, a marketplace that is rich in opportunity to really seize that traveling public.

Have you run into any conflicts with increasing development in the state, such as the growing natural gas industry? Is development starting to jeopardize that image of Wyoming as a wild and scenic place?

No. I mean, are there people out there who may see that? Yes. But when you look at the larger, the aggregate base of our consumer, I have not received any word in the office of travel and tourism. I was just in Dallas and Chicago two weeks ago where we conducted focus groups for a new television commercial that we are going to introduce next spring. It was interesting to see just what ‘Joe Public’ in these major metropolitan areas thinks of when he or she thinks of Wyoming. It has nothing to do with energy or the production of coal or oil or anything like that.

What was it?

Well unfortunately, Wyoming does not have a really stand-out image. One of our opportunities—challenges or opportunities, however you want to look at it—is to try to define that. They do think of Wyoming as vast wide-open spaces, and after they saw the commercial, they said, ‘Oh that looks beautiful, that’s where we want to go.’

Industry and oil and gas, agriculture, and tourism can all work very well for Wyoming’s economy and Wyoming’s future. They are not in competition or in conflict with one another. They can actually be intertwined to be great partners as we look at growing jobs for Wyoming and increasing our overall economic health.

It seems as if looking at the future of the state, there could be conflicts between tourism and oil and gas in places like the Upper Green River Valley, if development starts to infringe upon an area’s natural scenic wonder or to affect our wildlife. I was wondering if there was any state vision that helps you look forward and deal with these potential conflicts.

Well Gov. Freudenthal, the Wyoming legislators, the lawmakers, are cognoscente of the fact that we have a natural area here. That is why there is a managed plan for growth and a managed plan for development. It is not a free for all to just go out and drill and produce coal or whatever, the Department of Environmental Quality is very contentious about what happens. We all want to protect what is here. And that’s where when I say there is a partnership and we can work together, we really can.

Do you target hunters at all in your marketing?

[Hunting] is a seasonal opportunity and because there are a limited number of licenses available, it is not a supply-demand kind of thing that we can market and sell, but we do support the hunting industry. In a lot of areas in Wyoming, it’s a great economic benefit to those communities during the fall seasons. In our office,—it’s called the public information office but it is really geared more towards media and journalist relations—we are working a lot with writers to come and do stories. We’ve worked with Field and Stream, and Outdoor Guide; catalogs will come here and do photo shoots, and so we really are enhancing all of that in terms of the outdoors and hunting industries.

You mentioned the boom-bust economy of the state, it seems as if tourism could even that cycle out.

If you look at the numbers, you will see that…destination spending has increased 4.5 percent per year over the last six years. Local and state tax collections have increased 5.6 percent per year. That’s a huge contribution. If you took away the one industry that we all rely on [—the energy industry—] tourism is still there.

Tourism provides a great complement to Wyoming residents because growing the industry does not necessarily affect our lifestyle. Visitors come and then they leave, and so there is not the development, not the changes in the way we live and work.

The other opportunity is that product development, meaning museums, attractions and events, all of those things add to the quality life that we as Wyoming residents get to enjoy. It’s not a coincidence that economic development boards ask for a vacation guide when they are creating relocation packets, because to a prospective resident who would come here or a business that would locate here, that means something. To bring people in, you need quality of life opportunities, so it really does represent many effects of our industry.

Do you see any conflict between the idea of wildness as an attraction to the state and energy development on public lands?

We have less than 500,000 people in our state, there is still room for so much out there. We are certainly not at the point where we are compromising… this is my perspective, others may have a different view, but from my perspective, there’s a lot of room for growth and opportunity. There’s 100,000 square miles of space in Wyoming… I travel the state extensively and there are times when I will drive and not see another car for many, many miles, so I don’t think that we are suffering from being overcrowded.

But I appreciate the fact that it is a conflict for those that are here in many ways. We think, ‘I want if for myself, I don’t want to share it with anyone else,’ but public lands are just that, public, and they belong to everyone. They belong to us as Wyoming citizens, but they also belong to Americans. That is the beauty of public lands in all states, we have the opportunity to enjoy them wherever we go.

Change is inevitable. In order to allow change to happen—because it will happen whether we want it to or not—we need to be a proactive part of it. We need to manage the change and develop the change in a way that can still preserve the things that are really precious to us, and still allow growth and opportunity to happen. If you are not an active participant in change, it will move beyond you and you will have things that you might not want.

You say you think there is plenty of room for a healthy tourist economy to exist side-by-side with a vibrant minerals industry. It is hard for me to imagine the kind of development proposed—50,000 wells in the Powder River Basin, 11,000 wells for the Great Divide, 10,000 wells in the Upper Green River Valley—having no effect on the quality of Wyoming’s natural heritage. Do you really think we can do both? Doesn’t it seem as if there needs to be a concerted effort to develop with thought toward the impact of development on tourism?

We are committed to a well-managed balanced plan for developing a healthy Wyoming economy and I assure you that tourism will continue to play a key role.