Tourism drought causes Fairbanks business to dry up
By Rena Delbridge
Originally published Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 12:00 a.m.
Updated Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 2:48 p.m.
FAIRBANKS — On a typical summer evening, Chena Marina RV Park owner Suzanne Spanjer could count on meeting new friends from all over the world on the grassy lawns in her own backyard.
Sometimes she’d fire up a barbecue, other times watch with her traveling guests as float planes bounced onto the glassy lake at the park edge.
Many of her visitors would become repeat clients, and some became more than that. She met fiancé Bill Wileman — now the business’s chief operating officer — through the RV park. Wileman’s daughter connected with a traveler staying at the park and later married him.
Those days are over.
After 16 years in business, Spanjer decided to close the park for good Aug. 9. Costs are at all-time highs and tourism has trickled to nearly nothing — at least, tourism as she and other independent operators know it.
There’s a new tourist zeroing in on Alaska.
The state will probably remain on many travelers’ top-10 lists, Spanjer said. But families and retirees are having a harder time affording the drive from the Lower 48, and foreigners are arriving by plane and ship.
“People are still coming, but they’re not driving up the road,” Spanjer said. “Nobody is out on the roads. They’re gone.”
Jeff Sherouse is Port of Entry Director at the Alaska Highway border crossing, where most over-the-road vacationers enter Alaska. Crossings from Canada are down nearly 20 percent when compared with the same year-to-date period in 2007, and he’s seeing changes in the type of traffic, too.
As of Friday, 7,050 vehicles with 16,000 people had crossed into Alaska in 2008, compared to 8,747 vehicles with 19,668 passengers for the same time period last year.
“In previous years, you always saw a lot of motor homes,” Sherouse said. “What we’re seeing this year is more of people moving up.”
His perception is that quite a few of those making the transition are involved with the military.
Also absent are long queues of idling vehicles headed back into Canada, he said.
“Trends have changed a little,” he said. “The biggest cause is the fuel prices — that’s the biggest thing we hear when people come in.”
Motor home traffic seems to be changing in character as well, he said. Instead of vacationers from the Lower 48, he’s seeing increases in European and other travelers who fly into Whitehorse, Yukon, rent RVs, and tour the roads of Yukon and Alaska before boarding a flight home from Anchorage or Fairbanks.
Mike Busby, owner of Chicken Gold Camp in Chicken, said business at the end of the road is down about 10 percent from an exceptional 2007. But business is going pretty well thanks in part to recent adaptations like recreational gold mining that make Chicken a destination, rather than a stop along the way.
“We’re a little more diversified,” he explained. “We’re getting a lot of Alaskan travelers.”
Some establishments along the more well-traveled road trails aren’t quite able to draw business as a destination. Sherouse said he’s hearing plenty of tourists talk about restaurants, lodges and gas stations along the Alaska Highway that have closed for the season.
“A lot of them didn’t even open this year,” Sherouse pointed out. “That was a big problem; you could go 100 miles without seeing a place. The biggest gripes we’ve heard are fuel prices and there’s nowhere to stay.”
At milepost 1083 of the Alaska Highway, about halfway between Tok and Whitehorse, Loren Maluorno owns and operates Destruction Bay RV Lodge on the shores of Kluane Lake. Despite the scenery, vacationers are passing the place by, Maluorno said. His business is down at least 30 percent this year, and he hears plenty of talk from other operators who are closing down early.
He planned on some decrease — at least 10 percent — because of the politically heated election year.
That’s right — in his 15 years of lodge ownership, he’s learned that Lower 48 business drops like clockwork with election cycles. Add to that the high costs of fuel plus an entire season of record rainy, cold weather, and visitor totals are grim.
“It’s been hard on the customers,” Maluorno said. “They’re not staying as long in places. They’re not spending the money, and they’re driving right by.”
He hired two fewer employees this year, tightened restaurant hours, will close for the season two weeks early and made fewer property improvements.
“You just buckle up and weather the storm,” Maluorno said.
The storm isn’t raging quite as bad closer to Fairbanks, where Teffonie Wyman is part of the Santaland RV Park ownership team. She estimated traffic at the North Pole business is down around 10 percent, with a higher percentage than normal of visitors from places within the state, such as Palmer and Anchorage.
At Chena Marina, Spanjer won’t be leaving town.
But she’s tired of reacting to conditions instead of planning for the future — and the worst offender, high fuel costs, is well beyond her control.
“We did all the right things, and it did us absolutely no good,” Spanjer said. “It hasn’t been paying for itself.”
Instead, she’s adapting the business to accommodate the new types of tourists, and will continue renting a pool of three travel trailers and eight motorhomes. Next year, look for caravan packages offered through Adventures in Alaska RV Rentals. A few park sites at Chena Marina RV Park will be made available for long-term summer rent, although the guest facilities — bathrooms and showers, laundry and a social room — are closed for good.
yep no question about the drop in tourists. i live in north pole and can vouch for the above article, the roads are a whole lot less crowded and you dont see all the caravans you used to see making the trip north. my guess is high fuel prices.
Finaly a couple of posts stating what everyone knows! Instread of the constant pie in the sky posts about crowded CGs and endless strings of RVs on the highways.
We traveled to America twice this summer and the CGs that we stayed in were far from full.
We had no trouble getting a campground on our trip. Although we did get the last full hook-up site in Santaland in North Pole when we went through in early July and could not get into Cottonwood the day we went around Kluane Lake because there was a caravan there. The only time we found campgrounds heavily populated was when a caravan was there. We also had no trouble getting on tours at the last minute, except when the tour was cancelled for lack of people. We also thought there was a distinct decrease in travellers from 2005 when we made the same trip.
it is sad that Chena Marina RV Park is closing. We have stayed there during our 2002 and 2008 trips to AK. We liked it.
As others have said, we our trip to the north country in May, June, and July was much less crowded than in 2002.
Clattertruck
2008 SD F450 PSD 6.4L CC 4X4 DRW, Lariat Auto trans 4.30 LS, 2008 Snowriver 108 truck camper. Jeep Unlimited Rubicon as toad.
We are also sad to see the Chena Marina RV park closed. We were there this year for the Memorial Day weekend in May. It was far from full but doing better than many others we passed through in AK & YK. We saw many rentals on the road & a surprising number of AK plates but also far fewer lower 48 plates than we expected to see.
Yes, fuel was expensive. It accounted for about 25% of our total costs from MD to AK. No way were we going to sacrifice this trip.
Maybe it is time for N America to take a page out of the European book of RVing. Get out of the rolling mansions. Downsize to something that does not need 40' of parking space & guzzles over a gallon every 10 miles.
Boat: 32' 1996 Albin 32+2, single Cummins 315hp
40+ night per year overnighter
Maybe it is time for N America to take a page out of the European book of RVing. Get out of the rolling mansions. Downsize to something that does not need 40' of parking space & guzzles over a gallon every 10 miles.
Never happen!
No way can you impress friends and neighbors with a twenty footer!
Sea Dog wrote: Never happen!
No way can you impress friends and neighbors with a twenty footer!
Ah, but a 20 footer that you can take on the road is better than a 35 footer that has to sit in your driveway because you can't afford to drive it anywhere.
Many of the rentals in the North are to Europeans. The Yukon spends a good deal of its tourism advertising in Europe, and it is a "dream vacation" for many there. Most of those Europeans don't stay in commercial campgrounds. On the backroads that we travel, when we do meet other campers, the folks are usually from Germany, Switzerland, etc. We have yet to meet Americans on those backroads. And the one time we met a Canadian couple, it turned out they lived just 50 miles from us!
Europeans are willing to spend the money too, so it's not the cost of commercial camping. One Swiss couple was paying more than $12,000 for their rental for 16 weeks on the road. A German fellow was on his ninth trip to Yukon, and he always visited in September and rented a MH. Without exception, they preferred the experience of remote wilderness and open space. Not the cramped quarters of a commercial campground.
So I'm not surprised the commercial campgrounds in the North are hurting.
As well, a lodge along the Alaska Highway told us it was costing them $6,000 a month to run their generator, and they didn't operate an RV park. They said the RV parks were spending $10,000 a month to run their bigger generators longer hours. That's a big chunk of overhead to absorb into a business.
* This post was
edited 08/29/08 11:08am by sue.t *
I suspect there are many factors effecting the commercial campgrounds in the north country. Many of these have been mentioned above. On our 2006, we too met many Europeans that had flown over, rented an RV and were out camping, as sue t. mentioned. I think I talked to more Germans in Atlin BC than I did Canadians.
Alaska is facing a different set of problems from the fuel prices than most states. As someone that has been driving to/form Alaska for the last 46 years (first trip in 1962) I have seen the growth of commercial campgrounds over the years. On my first trip I don't remember a single one in Fairbanks, then a couple were put in, in conjunction with motels that were already there, one on Minnie Street off Cushman and one in the south part of town, probably off of Van Horn. My first trip I camped at the government one on the Chena, where University crosses the river on the east side of the road.
With the price of fuel escalating so rapidly, many Lower 48 and Canadians have made other plans and these travelers were the bread and butter of the commercial campgrounds.
Since most Alaska residents, both RVers and non-RVers, are not from Alaska, when they get a couple of weeks vacation, they fly outside to see family. Two weeks just isn't enough time to drive the RV outside. So many Alaska residents, that I know/have known, have never driven the Alaska Highway in their RVs. So while the percentage of RV owning residents is high, many only have the weekends to get out and camp. This short time period restricts how far they can go so on a trip. With over half the state's population living in the Anchorage Bowl (the Banana Belt) they tend to be restricted by time to going to the Kenai Peninsula or the lower Mat Su for the most part. I would guess that many of the residents know where to camp without using one of the commercial campgrounds, as there are many government, boon docking, etc. spots to camp if you know where to look.
Other states don't have this situation IMHO. Most of the folks living in Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, etc. are from there and that is where their families live. So the RVers living in those state can take their two weeks vacation, stop by and see family in many cases, and see some of the sites of their home state. So you have many locals using the commercial and non-commercial campgrounds. We saw this in Colorado this summer, at Mueller SP, we saw no more than a hand full of out of state tags but the place was full on the weekends with locals. This doesn't happen in Alaska or northern Canada.
I would wager that a person could check out all the commercial campgrounds in Fairbanks and on to the Canadian border and wouldn't find 2 Alaska tagged RVs in any of them, unless just passing through to/from the Lower 48. The 25 plus years we lived in Alaska we seldom, if ever, stayed in a commercial campground.
Alaska's commercial campgrounds, IMHO, have never caught on that they need to cultivate the "resident" population to use their facilities. Since most of us on this forum are RV owners/users we start thinking that we are at the center of the "tourist wheel" when in reality we are a very small portion of the visitors that arrive in Alaska each summer. The vast majority arrive by cruise ship and air. IMHO, the State of Alaska is not going to get too excited over a few campgrounds closing or a few less RVs.
Campgrounds, like all business endeavors, survive or fail, based upon the "supply and demand" principle just like any other business.
We stayed at Chena Marina RV Park July 21st. It was a nice park and good location. We might have stayed longer than one night but it was a bit pricy for our budget. I guess all the increases in camping fees were all related to the cost of fuelin one way or the other. Sorry to hear of any campground closing. We had a great trip and were gone from home for 130 days. It sure was a trip of a lifetime. Ed
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