Tourists Flocking to the U.S. West Give Hotel Bed Tax Revenues a Big Boost
Photo Credit: Yellowstone National Park's record 4.86 million visitors in 2021 helped boost gateway destinations' lodging taxes. Courtesy of National Park Service / Jacob Frank for NPS
Skift Take
Record lodging tax collections are rolling in for rural destinations in the West, which is good news. But only if those extra funds can also be used beyond marketing to mitigate the mounting negative impacts of overcrowding on the environment, on host communities and the tourism workforce.
Two years after the pandemic, a handful of U.S. tourism boards are reporting soaring lodging tax collections for fiscal year 2021.
On this comeback list are destinations in the West that are gateways to national and state parks, such as Montana and southwest Utah, where demand spikes began as early as summer 2020. But drive markets that didn’t shut down during Covid also benefited, like Arkansas, along with pockets of rural destinations across the U.S.
The double-digit growth in bed taxes currently ranges from 20 percent at the overall state level to 73 percent over 2019 levels for rural destinations that have shared data thus far, including Greater Zion, thus establishing new records. Lodging tax collections have also continued to soar into this first quarter of the year.
It's a remarkable turnaround from March 2020, when destination management organizations (DMO) saw their primary source of revenue, the bed tax, vanish along with
