Visit Fairfield Tourism director tells county board bureau needs to continue marketing

FAIRFIELD – Fairfield Convention & Visitors Bureau Executive Director Terry Baker presented the visitors bureau's annual report to the Jefferson County Board of Supervisors Monday.

The report covers July 1, 2019, to June 30 of this year.

Since it includes several months after the pandemic hit in March, Baker said the report reflected an 'up and down” year for tourism.

'Travel has been impacted heavily since March,” she said. 'We had to cut some programming, which we hope to bring back. We had to cut a lot of our destination management tasks, so we're not doing a lot with grants and beautification.”

Baker said that the visitors bureau has two chief roles. One is to market Fairfield to outsiders, and the other is to improve the quality of life in town so that Fairfield remains an attractive place to visit and move to.

The bureau does that by improving the appearance of the town through beautification efforts and improving accessibility such as putting up signs informing outsiders where to go.

Baker said the bureau is trying to maintain its focus on marketing, even though travel is down. She said that agencies that stop marketing altogether lose momentum that is hard to restart.

She mentioned how the state of Colorado defunded its tourism organization and saw a drastic decline in tourism in the ensuing years.

'It took them years to rebuild that after they started putting funds into it again,” she said. 'We don't want to be in that place. Once people are willing to travel more, we want their first thought to be to visit Fairfield.”

Baker said the key to marketing is repetition, because a person might need to read an advertisement four or five times before they 'jump on the plane,” that is, before they act on it.

Baker said the annual report shows that 360 people are employed in the tourism industry in Jefferson County, with a payroll of $6.5 million.

Tourism is a $42 million industry in the county.

'We all think that travel is really fun, but tourism is quite serious business,” Baker said. 'Especially when it comes to local jobs and the tax revenue collected.”

The visitors bureau has shifted its focus since March toward prioritizing ways to serve small hospitality businesses.

'We know businesses needed help interpreting funding available to them in the form of loans so they could remain in business,” Baker said. 'Our small businesses are vital to our downtown, and they're a very important part of the tourism puzzle.”

The bureau has held online shopping events through Facebook Live, where it's chosen a random Friday for local businesses to hold sales. Baker said it's been a success and has attracted online buyers from as far away as Pennsylvania who were using the time to order items from Fairfield businesses.