Anchorage Daily News | Tourism industry records a record

Anchorage Daily News | Tourism industry records a record
By BILL WHITE
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: October 20, 2004)

JUNEAU -- The Alaska tourism industry seems to have shaken off the doldrums induced by the 2001 terrorist attacks to post record numbers for the visitor season that just ended.

Ron Peck, president of the Alaska Travel Industry Association, gave that news during a briefing Tuesday at the Alaska State Chamber of Commerce annual conference.

Peck pegged the season's visitor count at 1.4 million, up 100,000 to 150,000 people from a year earlier.

"It looks like we've turned the corner after a couple of challenging years," Peck said. He was referring to a leveling off of tourism in 2002 and last year as some potential travelers stayed closer to home due to edginess after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

He said the final count on Alaska's tourism summer could be even higher. Juneau is reporting more cruise-ship passengers than the cruise industry has cited, but Peck thinks the way the ships total passengers could have caused an undercounting in some cases, he said.

For the full year, he forecast that the state will see 1.9 million visitors.

Peck was a panelist on a program of representatives from Alaska's core industries -- oil, fishing, mining, timber and tourism -- speaking about their businesses.

Peck said most visitor indicators showed robust growth last summer, at least through August:

• Anchorage car rentals were up 8 percent, indicating the independent traveler is back.

• Airport arrivals in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau and Ketchikan were up more than 10 percent, to 3.5 million total, a figure that includes Alaskans flying in-state.

• People crossing the Alaska-Canada borders in automobiles and recreation vehicles were up 2.5 to 3 percent. He said Lower 48 baby boomers are buying RVs like crazy, but few are taking the long vacation to Alaska yet. He noted that more Germans are flying a charter to Whitehorse, Yukon, and renting RVs there for less than the going rate in Anchorage -- he estimated 600 RVs were rented in Whitehorse this past summer versus 100 a year before.

• The cruise industry reports it carried 805,000 passengers, a figure Peck called very conservative. Last year the ships hosted 776,000 passengers.

Peck noted a couple of challenges for the visitor industry's future. One is an image problem, where Alaskans don't recognize the massive scale of the industry. According to Peck, 30,000 people work in the visitor industry, with 78 percent of the jobs filled by Alaskans. And he put the in-state spending by visitors from Outside at $2 billion annually.

Another problem is that the growing numbers of tourists are crowding the top Alaska destinations, he said. Denali National Park was full this past summer. Peck said his group is working on making more hotel rooms available, improving highways and developing other destinations such as Wrangell-St. Elias and Katmai national parks, Chugach National Forest and the south side of Denali.

Business editor Bill White can be reached at bwhite@adn.com or 257-4311.