With gas prices at record highs and summer now in full swing, it's no surprise a recent survey of U.S. consumers found that 66 percent said they were changing summer vacation plans because of high gas prices, and 34 percent canceled their plans entirely.

Few analysts think that oil, now above $140 per barrel, will get back down to $100 (indeed, some are now talking openly of $200 barrel oil). So it's safe to say the US tourist economy is probably undergoing a big shift. But where is it shifting to, and what does it mean for local economies in the long run?

High gas prices mean people have less money to spend on things like entertainment and travel, and big expensive trips to places like Europe and Disneyland are the first to go. While this bodes ill for the overbuilt and entirely airline-dependent Las Vegas hotel market, it can be a boon for more locally-oriented or cheaper destinations. For example, Door County, Wisconsin, has seen a boost in tourism activity apparently driven by people staying closer to home. The Pensacola Bay Area in Florida has similarly seen a rise in tourist activity because because it's seen as a budget alternative in this popular region.

The numbers are hitting the airline industry particularly hard -- and with good reason: for family vacations, it's still cheaper to travel even very long distances by car than it is to fly. A shift of vacation dollars from distant destinations to local favorites will have a noticeable effect on local and regional economies, to be sure. But the effect on tourism that is driven by business travel may well be even more significant.

Look no farther than the Las Vegas tourist economy, which hums on a constant flow of conventions. Conventions, of course, mean not just thousands of people staying hotels for meetings about widgets or land use planning, but thousands of people --many with spouses or even families in tow-- going out to restaurants, seeing shows, renting cars for side trips, and, of course, gambling. When an organization decides not to send employees to this year's national convention, those tourist dollars aren't generated elsewhere: they simply disappear.

It's not hard to imagine how this trend of cutting back on travel could ripple through other decisions, from the organization deciding where to hold next year's 40,000-person convention to the public agency developing tourism-focused infrastructure. Here in Portland, Oregon, our regional economic development body has been working for years on a project to build a new high-end hotel next to our recently-expanded convention center. On one hand, this "Headquarters Hotel" is needed to keep Portland competitive in the national market for larger conventions, and would be a continuation of a history of public investment in the convention center area. On the other hand, a significant investment of public dollars in a project that assumes continued growth in the national convention market seems a decidedly riskier venture today than even a few years ago.

One of the main messages of Post Carbon Cities is that local governments need to identify their own vulnerabilities to peak oil and determine what their own local solutions should be. It may well be that Portland will see an increase in national convention traffic despite rising fuel prices (thanks in part to 30+ years of planning that have made it an unusually attractive budget tourist destination) and that a Headquarters Hotel is a smart investment. But only Portland stakeholders can determine that and take on that public financial risk.

What we don't need are plans driven by decision-makers out of touch with local needs, vulnerabilities and resources. The 1980s-era attempt to revive the declining industrial city of Flint, Michigan with an automotive technology oriented theme park (as hilariously and sadly chronicled in the film "Roger and Me") comes to mind. So does this project to build a maglev train from Disneyland (the one in California, not Florida) to Las Vegas with federal transportation dollars. There are many ways we can transition our tourism economies into the era of expensive oil, but connecting playgrounds across the desert with high-tech trains is not one of them.

Photo credits:
Sarah Nichols
maja_x1

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