Sports & Events A Major Driver of the Vail Valley Economy

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Our community revolves around winter recreation and the efforts of Vail Resorts and other community partners to provide the very best vacation experience to our guests. Over time, we’ve complimented these efforts with a variety of special events to round out the calendar and to enhance the guest experience. This weekend’s Winter Teva Mountain Games are a great example of a new event helping fill a “hole” in the calendar to drive lodging occupancy & excitement in the village.

The Vail Valley Partnership, in conjunction with the Vail Local Marketing District and other community partners throughout the valley, have spotlighted participatory events and sporting tournaments as an opportunity to drive destination guests to our community and to help drive our tourism economy outside the ski season. These stakeholder groups recognized an opportunity to increase usage of our existing facilities to drive overnight visitation and economic vitality during low visitation times. A regional, collaborative approach has helped all individual municipalities & entities reach their goals more effectively & efficiently.

The Partnership recruited a number of events in 2011 – driving over 25,000 event attendees and participants and resulting in guest spending of over $18,000,000. Some key successes include Tough Mudder, the Snowball Music Festival, Ride the Rockies, Vail Soul Music Festival, the Diva Half Marathon and many smaller events throughout the year.

2012 looks equally positive from an event standpoint; we’ll be welcoming back many of the events we worked so hard to bring here last year (including Tough Mudder in June) and look forward to hosting new events ranging from cycling (Gran Fondo & Tour of Vail) to football (University of Colorado football training camp) to music (The Gathering – Season of Song). The estimated number of participants and attendees for these events is close to 40,000 with estimated guest spending of $30,000,000+ to our local economy.

This of course doesn’t include signature events that have helped put the Vail Valley on the map including the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, Vail International Dance Festival, Teva Mountain Games or Vail Mountain’s wildly successful Spring Back to Vail and Vail Snow Daze events.

The Partnership is taking an active role to establish partnerships amongst all stakeholders to provide adequate venues for many desirable and potentially beneficial events. This will increase the year-round economic vitality of Eagle County and individual municipalities. We’ve created the Sports & Event Coalition, a valley wide collaborative effort, to ensure that we are working with all groups and driving impact throughout the valley. More information on the Sports & Event Coalition can be found at www.VailValleyPartnership.com under “Signature Programs”.

What can your business do to help? If you benefit from these events, get off the sidelines and join the Partnership. If you are already a member, tell your neighbors to join to help us bring more tournaments and events to the valley. The Vail Valley Partnership takes a leadership role to bring groups, meetings, events and leisure visitors to the Vail Valley for the economic benefit of the community and our member businesses. But we can’t do any of it without support of our membership.

Contact Jennifer Weintraub at (970) 477-4001 or via email at jweintraub@visitvailvalley.com or visit us online at VailValleyPartnership.com to join.

As always, I encourage all member businesses to get engaged with the Partnership and to contact us with any suggestions you may have to help us better serve you. Call us at (970) 476-1000 or stop by our offices in Avon at Traer Creek Plaza to share your feedback.