Idaho tourism recovering from COVID-19 – Idaho Enterprise Evaluate

Carrie Westergard

Yes we will be back.

Idaho and the Boise metropolitan area have already seen the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. As we adjust to today’s version of near-normal, I’m happy to announce that visitors are once again ready to gather and travel. We are also grateful to you for maintaining quite a few visits with staycations over the past year. This year would not have gone like this without your support from the hotel industry. Here in Boise and the surrounding area, we celebrate the future instead of getting angry. We welcome visitors back to our region and encourage them to bring more meetings, conventions and events to our region.

But all of that excitement was not without its challenges. The climb back to the kind of visiting and gathering activities we enjoyed before the pandemic isn’t easy, but we’re getting there. Make no mistake, Idaho is well positioned to greet visitors who yearn to get where life is a little more relaxed and where there is room to breathe.

As Idaho returns to the mind of the nation as a place to visit and escape the bigger cities, I thought it was worth sharing some of the things we learned and how we intend to re-emerge as a popular smaller city, that the visitors like.

We have already received some good indicators of progress. Recently, the Western States Hostage Negotiators regional event reported on its website that their meeting in Boise was “a fantastic five-day personal training session in Boise.” More than 300 participants reported a high quality visit.

Now here in June, we’re taking a close look at sporting events that are coming back online, including the US Youth Soccer Association’s Far West Regionals and the USA Pickleball Pacific Northwest Regional Championship due to take place June 22-27, a first for the Boise -Area. These in-depth events have inspired our own local organizers to reconsider their decisions to reduce or even close sporting events. The Twilight Criterium and Boise Albertsons Open are planning a comeback and we are all excited to see the iconic Idaho Potato Bowl return to the Boise Fields in December this month.

This is exactly what we say to many people who live here in Idaho but are associated with larger, national or regional economic coalitions, associations or events. When these people tell me that their events are being canceled in other cities, my answer is: send them to us. At the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau, we’re good at making room.

We call this our “Bring Your Conference Home” initiative and an idea that is long overdue. If you are familiar with a meeting or a gathering in your daily work that is looking for a landing place, I would like to encourage you to speak up and represent Boise as a meeting place.

This could take a few more years, and although we have successfully hosted events with up to 1,700 visitors, we are also well on the way with small groups. The 300-600-strong group is a bit of a sweet spot for Boise; We do well with events of this size, and we’re only getting better at them.

In our professional and personal lives we are often tied to something bigger, to a group of people who share our type of work or are otherwise connected and who are trying to get together whenever possible. And so often we go to bigger cities or far away places for our meetings. To all of you, I say, don’t forget your hometown and how nice it could be to gather people in Boise for a change.

That’s the kind of lessons we’ve learned in this unique era in history. Time and again we have heard stories about cities and travel destinations that are struggling to maintain their identity in these challenging times. Those who interfered and worked hard to keep this up have been the successful ones. I admired the many shops in Boise that did just that. It’s that kind of resilience, that kind of determination that makes Boise a great place to live and work. And like we did before the pandemic arrived, I believe this makes Boise a great place to visit too.

Carrie Westergard is the executive director of the Boise Convention & Visitors Bureau.