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Lodging Business In Park City Is Up This Summer

Park City Chamber Bureau

Summertime bookings in the Park City area are hard to predict but nightly reservations for August are up over last year.  Business travel for mid-week frequently gets booked years in advance but weekend visitors coming to Park City tend to decide more on the spur of the moment. Taxes, room rates, booking practices and occupancy all play into evaluating the summer business climate.   Carolyn Murray has this:

There’s a new Park City Municipal 1 % Transient Room Tax that took effect in January this year. The president and CEO of the Park City Chamber Bureau, Bill Malone can’t point to anything that shows businesses have been hurt. He says the

    “You know a lot of the business that was booked and settled and confirmed for that meeting was done a long time ago now. Long before that tax was in effect.  Now, we saw that in conversations with the county with the recent transportation taxes and conversations we had with county officials at the Chamber Board a lot of concern with the total tax rate and where we are falling competitively within that. But we don’t have anything right now that we can say we lost a piece of business specific to the tax rate.”

Mallone says the conference organizers who are paying the hotel bills tend to notice the overall tax rate more than a someone paying for just one room.

    “It’s not just what percentage of it goes to lodging.  It’s the total amount they pay when they check out of the hotel.  These group businesses are paid by one person at one time.  So the tax isn’t just what you see on my stay or your stay.  It’s maybe on 300 rooms.”  

Malone says summer lodging season is May to October and occupancy runs about 46%.  During ski season, occupancy runs about 49 percent.             

 “That 49 % in the winter generates a lot more tax revenue and a lot more money in terms of spending by the guest with that same rate in the summer.”  

Skier days were down last winter season but room rates held steady. 

“Last winter when we looked at a tough year for snow,  for us, probably the toughest that we’ve seen in some time, a tough year in skier days in some respects but occupancy was only down 1 % and rate was flat to the previous year.”

Malone says for 30 years 90 % of the County Transient Room Tax has paid for the Chamber’s advertising efforts to promote lodging.  The County adopted a new regulation which will drop the revenue split over the next several years.

“It goes to a 70 -30 split but it does it over a three year time frame. This year we’re into an 83-17 split.  Then we go to a 76-24 and then a 70-30 split.”

Malone says the new hotel projects coming on line should help to offset the loss in tax revenues that they would put towards their advertising budget.  Even though Park City lodging businesses altogether have just 49 % occupancy, there are more hotels under construction.

He says there are no pressing legislative issues they’re tracking over the summer.  There will be a new State Senator for District 26 next year and they’ll plan to bring the newly elected person up to speed after November 6th.

As KPCW has reported, the new laws for selling alcohol in restaurants and bars have caused a lot of frustration for business owners and Malone says he hopes the legislature is considering the unintended consequences of the rule changes.  

“There were a lot of people who had to make some hard changes effective this summer as it related to construction and rules and which tyupe of license they had to deal with.

You know, this one, I think should be a case study with our legislators to understand they should be careful when you tweak these things, what happens to small businesses in our community.”

That’s Bill Malone, President and CEO of the Park City Chamber Bureau.  

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