Circus huckster P.T. Barnum was right. There really is no such thing as bad publicity.
Just ask the Utah Travel Council. In the weeks prior to the the Olympic bribery scandal becoming international news, the council logged about 600 calls a week from people inquiring about Utah travel destinations.Since the scandal broke, the numbers of calls have more than doubled. "We got 600 calls in one day last week," said Spence Kinard, deputy director of the Utah Travel Council.
It's hard to say if all those calls -- on average, about 1,200 calls a week were received during January and February -- were coming from people who had their curiosity piqued by the Olympic scandal. Prison inmates who work for the Travel Council answering the phones don't ask that question.
"There's no way we can say how many of the calls are normal requests for information and how many people saw pictures of Utah on a newscast or heard about Utah skiing because of the scandal," Kinard said. "But there is no question it has generated a lot of interest. The numbers speak for themselves."
The number of e-mail and regular-mail requests for travel information has also doubled since the scandal broke.
The Travel Council has no way of gauging whether the increased interest in the scandal will translate into more visitors. Officials have always anticipated the Olympics would draw increased interest, and the scandal may have simply accelerated that.
That aside, the council in recent years has downplayed its efforts to attract more and more travelers to the state, focusing its efforts instead on getting those that do come to stay longer and spend more.
According to 1998 figures, the number of passengers passing through the Salt Lake International Airport declined 4 percent compared to the previous year. Visitation at national parks declined 1.3 percent, and it declined 1.1 percent at national monuments and national recreation areas like Lake Powell and Flaming Gorge. Visitation was also down 3.5 percent at state parks.
That could have been bad news for the Utah travel industry, but Kinard points out that travel-related revenue grew last year by 6.7 percent.
"We have been preaching the message of stay longer-spend more for a long time, and maybe the numbers are a reflection of that," he said.
Utah's top tourist destinations stay pretty much the same year in and year out. The top destination is Temple Square with an estimated 5 million visitors a year (the LDS Church does not release official visitation numbers). Next on the list is Zion National Park, followed by Lake Powell, Flaming Gorge and Bryce Canyon National Park.
More surprising was the rest of the top 10. The Lagoon amusement park in Davis County placed sixth with 1.15 million visitors, followed by Wasatch Mountain State Park with 886,000 visitors, Arches National Park with 859,000 visitors, Hogle Zoo with 821,000 visitors and the LDS Church Family History Library with an estimated 817,000 visitors.
Courtland Nelson, director of the Utah Division of State Parks, is not surprised that scenic Wasatch Mountain made the list. The popularity of the golf course there has exploded in recent years. Golfing magazines have highlighted the course, and Wasatch Front residents think nothing about driving the 50 minutes to the Heber Valley just to play the course.
"It has developed its own clientele," Nelson said. "It has become the second- or third-busiest golf course in the state, which is pretty amazing considering the short season (because of its high elevation)."
Not on the list of top destinations was the Great Salt Lake, although it may be difficult to count the number of people who drive out to look at the lake.
No individual ski resort made the list, although 3.1 million skiers visited the state during the winter of 1997-1998, staying an average of 4.4 days and spending $104 each day they stayed.
Utah's other two national parks, Capitol Reef and Canyonlands, didn't make the Top 10 list either. But when you lump the national parks together, 9.5 million people visited Utah's national parks, monuments and recreation areas, making National Park Service properties the number one tourist attraction in the state.
According to the Utah Travel Council, tourism contributes $4.1 billion to the Utah economy, $383 million in tax revenues and about 65,000 tourism jobs and another 51,000 jobs indirectly related to tourism.
In other words, tourism represents 8.5 percent of the Utah gross state product, and accounts for about one in every nine jobs.
Demographic profiles of visitors show most (32 percent) come from the West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington. Rocky Mountain states accounted for 28 percent of visitors, while 19 percent came from Midwestern and Eastern states.
The Travel Council estimates there were 700,000 visits from foreigners in 1998, most coming from Canada, followed by Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
Karen Sudmire, research director for the Travel Council, said Utah, like other Rocky Mountain states, experienced a decline in foreign travelers, a factor due to currency exchange rates that made it more expensive.
"The length of stay for these tourists decreased because of that, and we found more of them were going to the coast or to cheaper destinations," she said. "It is more difficult and more expensive to travel to Utah and the other states in the intermountain West."
Domestic travel was down somewhat because of the lack of bargain airfares into Salt Lake International Airport when Delta refocused its efforts on more profitable markets.
But vehicle traffic was up, prompting Sudmire to estimate an increase in total visits to the state from 17.4 million visits in 1997 to 17.7 last year. Spending increased from $4 billion to $4.1 billion.
"We're calling it a modest increase over previous years but not like the banner years of 1995-96," she said.
Travel Council officials are anticipating more growth in visitation in the next few years as the 2002 Winter Games spurs interest in Salt Lake City as a destination. Based on the Calgary experience, tourism will increase in the years before, during and immediately after the Games.
"The key is really for the state to keep up its marketing efforts to create an awareness that lasts well after the Games," Sudmire said. "It will fade if we do nothing."