No more fun and games: How will downturn affect tourism, theater sectors?

Story by Chris Graham

Your first instinct during a recession is to cut back on extras like eating out, going to the theater, going on vacation.

Or is it?

“The recent press has amplified a growing anxiety that is out there about home finances. But for the most part, Americans tend to see their leisure time and vacations almost as a birthright. So it may change a little bit, but it won’t be something that they would give up quickly,” said Mark Shore, the director and CEO of the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau.

And where things might change locally for those in the local entertainment sector is in terms of the people who will be turning the turnstiles.

“Typically there does tend to be a little bit of a shift in terms of where people end up going. But mostly it tends to be a shifting of their activity. Virginia tends to be heavily visited by other Virginians. And the D.C. market for Charlottesville is a very strong market, and still is just a two-hour drive away,” Shore said.

“You may want to go to Charlottesville, you may want to go hiking. You want to go to the Frontier Culture Museum, you want to go to the Woodrow Wilson Library. You want to see what Mary Baldwin College looks like. You want to come to the American Shakespeare Center. We have a great opportunity now in these economic times to really capitalize more on what Virginia’s destinations are. And to really mount a campaign to get ourselves on the map,” said David Dreyfoos, the managing director at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton.

So it seems that what will be happening in the next few months is that the industry will be changing its focus in terms of the traveler that it wants to attract, at least in the short term, until the economy gets back on a solid footing again.

The good news is that many players in the industry will do OK with that new short-term focus on more local travelers. But there will be some pain and agony, particularly in the hotel sector.

“So often, we try to measure things in the tourism industry by room nights - the lodging establishments and their reported tax revenues and this kind of thing. And when you have folks coming in for those day trips, you don’t really get that measuring stick that you get from the hotels, who report on how many room nights and how much taxes have been generated in a specific jurisdiction, and those kinds of things,” said Brian Ososky, the executive director of the Shenandoah Valley Travel Association.

And what that does is affect how local governments budget for tourism-related expenses - including putting money toward tourism advertising and promotional materials and activities.

“And if the economy is difficult, it also makes it harder for the governments to provide grants, so it becomes a little tighter there, because their budgets get squeezed by the legislators,” said Kim Edward Renz, the executive director of Theater at Lime Kiln, a nonprofit theater based in Lexington.

“The legislators say, Well, the economy is bad, so we have to cut back. And unfortunately one of the areas that gets cut back really quickly and very often larger than some others is arts - because they consider it to be extracurricular, et cetera. Those of us who work in it understand it a little differently.
“About 20 percent of our funding comes from grants,” Renz said. “Probably close to the same amount, maybe slightly smaller than that, comes from sponsorships at this time. We’d like to increase that. But the squeeze is not just on us - it’s also on our sponsors. Because if people are not spending their dollars coming to them, for whatever reason, the squeeze hit them, too.”

There’s still hope across the spectrum that the talk about the squeeze on donors and government finances and travelers is just that, just talk.

“I’m going to stick with what I’ve been saying about this all along. I think the industry is resilient,” Ososky said. “People will always want to be entertained in some way, shape or form. And I think when it comes to their weekend escapes, their day trips, their family vacations, I think those decisions may be made differently about where people go, but I think people are still going to make time to do those sorts of activities.”