Park City chamber outlines tourism strategy as transient‑room tax dips

Jennifer Wesselhoff, president and CEO of the Park City Chamber and Convention and Visitors Bureau, told the Summit County Council the county’s 3% transient room tax (TRT) is structured by state law to fund tourism activity and, in part, capital projects such as convention centers and recreation facilities.

Wesselhoff said Summit County collected just over $18 million in TRT in 2022 and that the chamber and lodging partners track room nights, occupancy and average daily rate as the primary indicators of tourism health. “A full 75% of the total TRT that’s being collected by the county is being collected by lodging partners within the Park City limits,” she said. She also told the council that recent county reports showed a 44% drop in TRT collections for June 2023 compared with the prior year’s benchmark months.

The chamber’s FY24 budget, Wesselhoff said, directs 53% of operating dollars to marketing and visitor attraction and roughly 11% to visitor education and management programs that support the new sustainable tourism plan. The plan aims to “integrate tourism with stewardship and preservation,” she said, and the bureau has launched a sustainable‑tourism grant program to help nonprofit events, arts projects and visitor‑management pilots.

Council members asked for detail on the data sources and on whether the chamber’s marketing targets will change as travelers become more price‑sensitive. Wesselhoff and Jeff Jones, the county’s economic development director, said the chamber uses tax collection data as the definitive measure of overall activity and supplemental services such as Destinmetrics for trend analysis; Jones said about 60% of the lodging inventory currently reports into that private dataset. Wesselhoff said the bureau targets higher‑value, out‑of‑state visitors in shoulder seasons and pursues group and meeting leads to smooth seasonality.

The presentation also flagged competition from large projects outside county borders and urged local coordination with the county’s transit, economic development and sustainability offices to preserve visitor spending while reducing neighborhood impacts. Wesselhoff said chamber partners were “anxious to work with” the county and the newly formed tourism advisory board that state law now requires in TRT counties.

For now, the chamber emphasized a dual message: preserve targeted marketing to protect lodging‑driven revenue while investing in visitor education and management to reduce environmental and quality‑of‑life impacts.

The council did not take policy action during the presentation; staff said the chamber’s materials and the TRT data slides would remain part of the public record and could be returned for budget or policy discussion later this year.