Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board Partners With UW’s WORTH Initiative

The Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Joint Powers Board (JHTTB) has partnered with the University of Wyoming’s Wyoming Outdoor Recreation, Tourism and Hospitality (WORTH) Initiative and Teton County’s Regional Transportation Planning Division to create a more sustainable community and destination.

After support and approval from local town and county elected officials, a $600,000 Destination Development Program grant awarded to the JHTTB from the Wyoming Office of Tourism (WOT) has been allocated to develop a tourism dashboard to measure impacts on the local community ($513,129) and to conduct a mobility hub study to better manage visitor movements ($86,000).

In December, WOT unveiled the Destination Development Program “to help Wyoming destinations develop their communities to be visitor-ready and to have the capacity to leverage the visitor economy.” JHTTB applied for the Destination Development Program, and Teton County was awarded $600,000.

As a leading tourist destination, JHTTB earmarked the special reserve funds to advance the work of its Sustainable Destination Management Plan. After receiving unanimous support from local elected officials to put these funds to use for Jackson and receiving final approval from JHTTB members, agreements have been put in place with UW and Teton County to carry out work to better understand tourism’s impact on Jackson Hole and to consider solutions for tourism management topics such as transportation.

“These public, private and statewide partnerships allow our community to make immediate progress on priority initiatives that would otherwise still be one to three years in the future,” JHTTB Executive Director Crista Valentino says.

UW’s WORTH Initiative has been allocated $513,129 to “identify and catalog impact indicators and data on multiple areas related to sustainable destination,” as stated in the approved scope of work. Over the course of two years, JHTTB will work with WORTH to collect data on visitor use and visitation impacts, ultimately developing an industry-leading tourism dashboard that’s regularly updated and accessible to the entire community.

“The WORTH Initiative is excited to partner with the Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board to provide support for the Sustainable Destination Management Plan,” says Dan McCoy, the initiative’s interim director. “Our efforts are focused on developing a destination data bank, a visitor intercept survey and the resident sentiment survey. All of this would not be possible without the support from the Wyoming Office of Tourism’s Destination Development Program funds to support local communities.”

WORTH is evaluating community indicators from over 300 data points and will deploy community and visitor survey opportunities to “identify and catalog all pertinent impact indicators” and “interpret data and analyze trends to communicate the complex story of tourism to the public in a simple way.”

“This will give the community some baseline and ongoing data points with which to make management and marketing decisions for the destination and, more comprehensively, give us a picture of the state of tourism and its positive and negative effects within the community so that we can better adjust to the needs of the destination and proactively work toward sustainability,” says Mary Bess, a JHTTB board member and sustainability chair.

Working simultaneously, Teton County’s Regional Transportation Planning Division will use $86,000 to supplement the $80,000 budgeted from Teton County and the town of Jackson to conduct a mobility hub study and develop a mobility action plan by June 2024. Key goals of this plan include identifying successful strategies to manage visitor and resident mobility; evaluating existing conditions of areas where visitors experience transportation congestion; prioritizing best practices and mobility management strategies that may be most successful in Jackson; and developing a mobility hub concept design.

The JHTTB is dedicated to developing a healthy economy that preserves Jackson Hole’s natural capital, provides a quality visitor experience and enhances the well-being of the community. For more information, go to www.visitjacksonhole.com.