The six-day Sparkler Juniors youth softball tournament brought nearly 600,000 out-of-market visits to the city last summer, providing a mini-economic boom for local businesses and, eventually, the city’s general fund, according to Visit Loveland Marketing Manager Charles Lammers.
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On Tuesday, the Loveland City Council took steps to attract more large-scale events and their visitors to Loveland by voting unanimously to establish a Tourism Improvement District (TID), a new funding mechanism designed to expand the city’s tourism marketing efforts.
“I think that it’s a tool that we can use especially to celebrate who we are and also to bring visitors to Loveland to share with them who we are as well,” said Ward 3 representative Caitlin Wyrick prior to the vote.
Since 2009, the city’s tourism budget has been funded by a voter-approved 3% lodging tax charged on overnight stays at hotels in the city. Per the terms of the ballot language, the resulting revenue can only be spent on marketing, promotion, regional events or attractions.
Loveland’s new tourism improvement district is a distinct entity from the city and will be governed by a board of up to nine members, consisting of representatives from the local hospitality industry.
The district will also add 3% to hotel stays, but, unlike the lodging tax, the hotels are voluntarily imposing the fee in exchange for a dedicated source of funding for tourism promotion and destination development, Economic Development Director Marcie Willard told the council.
“(The TID board) could participate with the city in water (for ballfields), they could participate in capital investments,” Economic Development Director Marcie Willard told the council. “So it has a broader scope than we currently have with Visit Loveland … and it would allow us to provide a broader level of value.”
That broader value adds up to roughly $875,000 in the district’s first year, according to estimates from the Visit Loveland team based on hotel occupancy rates of 50%.
And the opportunities for those dollars are substantial, Lammers said.
Specifically, the TID could fund more sophisticated tourism marketing efforts, including AI-powered visitor planning tools and partnerships with online travel agencies such as Expedia, Booking.com and TripAdvisor.
“Which would allow us to capture more missed booking opportunities from Colorado-inspired future travelers who are still in the trip planning phase,” he said.
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The district could also help Loveland pursue more large-scale conferences, sporting events and tournaments, like the Sparkler, as well as investing in destination-focused events, such as the annual Sweetheart Festival, which attracted 1,200 visitors from more than 50 miles away and generated nearly $2 million in direct visitor spending, he continued.
“This year, we heard many reports from downtown businesses that a steady number of customers had verbally stated they were visiting from out of town, and some of those same businesses recorded record sales at a time they needed them most,” he said.
According to Lammers, those types of marketing, event support and destination-development efforts typically generate between $10 and $35 in visitor spending for every dollar invested.
Council members largely embraced the proposal as a way to increase tourism-related spending without drawing on the city’s general fund or imposing additional costs on residents.
“I really loved your numbers about what that kind of ripple effect this is for the rest of the city, and I think Loveland will truly benefit from this,” said Mayor Pro Tem Andrea Samson. “I don’t see this negatively impacting our residents at all.”
Questions focused primarily on how the district would be governed, what types of projects it could support and how its success would be measured. Several members also noted that the assessment was requested by the hotel industry itself and would be paid primarily by overnight visitors.
The resolution passed on an 8-0 vote, with Councilor Laura Light-Kovacs absent. The district will take effect July 1, or as soon as possible thereafter, and will operate for an initial 10-year term. Hotels with fewer than 10 rooms, campgrounds, RV parks and short-term rentals will be exempt from the 3% fee.
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