POSITIVE VIBES
CARE FOR COLORADO THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF TOURISM TO THE STATE CANNOT BE UNDERESTIMATED, BUT THERE IS A FINE LINE BETWEEN ATTRACTING TOURISTS AND OVERLOADING THE STATE’S NATURAL RESOURCES
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T WEST OF 105 we try to straddle the line between the tried and tested and the unknown and the yet to be discovered. We want to ensure people have the best possible time in Colorado, whether they are visiting from another part of the state or coming from the other side of the world, but we also want to make sure people visit lesser-known spots (for both sustainability reasons and because there are some incredible places, things and experiences that do not get the attention they deserve). The Colorado Tourism Office has the same task, and we spoke with Cathy Ritter, director of the CTO, about the organization’s efforts to ensure that the increasing number of visitors to our state have both a positive and sustainable time. “Three years ago, when the CTO was developing a new state-wide strategic
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plan for the Colorado tourism industry, we held a series of listening sessions around the state - 23 in all - and it didn’t matter where we were in the state, we were hearing concerns about the impacts of travelers on Colorado’s natural resources,” Ritter said. “Sometimes that was expressed as concerns about impacts on water, sometimes the impacts on land, on wildlife and on special places. It quickly became clear that this was an issue that was very much on the minds of residents and tourism stakeholders, and we, as the state tourism agency, needed to develop a meaningful response to those concerns.”
to visit popular places at different times of the year,” Ritter explains. “Every one of those itineraries includes some sort of sustainable tourism activity, too, whether it’s an educational or voluntourism activity so we can hopefully encourage and inspire travelers to visit in ways that benefit the state and protect resources.”
A year later, and the first stage of that meaningful response had been formulated.
“The other major initiative we undertook took a little more time to unfold because we were really interested in aligning ourselves with a highly credible organization to develop messaging to inspire travelers to protect Colorado resources while they were here,” Ritter said. “We looked around and ended up creating a
“The Colorado Field Guide is an online resource that contains more than 130 travel itineraries throughout the state that aim to take travelers to less visited places or to encourage them
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Visit colorado.com/colorado-field-guide to see it. That was the first step of a multi-year plan. Ritter explains what else the CTO has been up to when it comes to achieving sustainability goals.
