Salt Lake tourism off to great start

According to two of Visit Salt Lake’s key economic indicators, the first quarter of 2017 shows Salt Lake is off to a strong start in terms of hotel room nights and Super Pass sales. Super Pass is Visit Salt Lake’s ski lift ticket program tailored to destination skiers and snowboarders and administered through its winter brand, Ski City.

STR Global, a leading provider of data benchmarking and analytics for the global hospitality industry, reports that Salt Lake County’s hotel occupancy for the first quarter of 2017 was 77.5 percent, a 6.5 percent increase over the same period in 2016. Combined with an average hotel daily room rate (ADR) of $111, the occupancy hike delivers a 13 percent increase in total hotel revenues.

Even more robust, Salt Lake’s Convention District posted a 7.8 percent increase in occupancy with a 5.3 percent increase in rates to claim a 14 percent increase in total hotel revenues for the Convention District. March was particularly impressive, posting a 21 percent and 25 percent increase in hotel revenues for Salt Lake County and the Convention District, respectively.   

Helping drive these increases, Visit Salt Lake (VSL) and the Salt Lake hospitality community hosted 118,478 meeting and convention attendees in the first quarter of 2017, a 22 percent increase over the first quarter of 2016 (97,227 attendees).

According to Scott Beck, VSL president and CEO, a number of factors account for Salt Lake’s strong start, including the increased number of citywide conventions (defined as “consuming” at least 750 hotel rooms on peak nights) as well as increased convention attendance. These increases also factor into the growth of ADR as higher occupancy drives hotel room rate increases, benefiting the hotels as well as the residents of Utah due to the increased impact of the visitor spending in the destination. Other factors include the strong local economy and, according to Beck, VSL’s focused sales and marketing efforts.

The Ski City Super Pass roared as well. One of the ski industry’s most flexible and value-laden lift ticket programs, offering direct-to-lift access at Salt Lake’s four resorts (Alta, Brighton, Snowbird and Solitude), the Super Pass reported a year-over-year growth of 51 percent as of March 31 with just over $3.5 million in sales.