RV Parks, hotels report upswing in visitors

With travelers and tourists making their presence known in Hot Springs County, many RV parks and local motels have positive things to report. Business is booming at the moment. 

Eagle RV’s Dennis Jaussaud said, “We’ve been absolutely just crazy busy. Which is good. We started out the year, usually, we start getting reservations in December, even the year before. But most of them start coming December, January and when they announced the virus we got tons of cancelations. Usually, Memorial Day starts off our busy summer and we were about 50% capacity on Memorial Day. We had three family reunions scheduled and all three canceled. For quite a while it was pretty dead, and now lately we’re filling up every night.”

Jaussaud can only speculate what caused this positive change. He said, “People have been cooped up in their house and they want to get out and travel.”

Wyoming Garden’s Jeanne Waltz said, “Business is excellent.” They are totally booked. It has been busy since the first of April for her.

As a 20-year business veteran, she said they had a lot of traveling nurses, along with a lot of monthly’s coming in, for example, with the construction in town.

Right now with all her monthly’s she only has four spaces she can rent out to tourists. Waltz said, “I turn away probably 20 people a day. I send them to all the parks. I know the other parks are full. We end up sending people around in circles.” 

Waltz added, “I think it’s especially busy this year for a lot of the tourism because they want to come to Wyoming because we don’t have a lot of cases of COVID. That is their main reason and they want to get out of wherever they are. I have seen an inordinate amount of Californian’s and from Washington and Oregon.” 

When asked why the positive change happened, Waltz said, “They’re tired of all the restrictions that are being implemented in a lot of the other states compared to Wyoming.”

Roundtop Motel Liz Freeman said, “We’ve picked up from where we were a few months ago. We’re definitely getting more tourists coming through.” The increase happened to them at the end of June. Freeman said, “People started showing up when the pools opened back up.” Right now they are full almost every night. She estimates that 70% are reservations. She is also having to turn people away. Her customers are coming from all over. Quite a few from Wyoming are traveling as well. 

Most people she’s talked to are ready to get out and start traveling again and go to places that don’t have a lot of COVID cases. They are thinking Wyoming is a much safer place. 

For the rest of the year, the businesses are not as booked as they normally are. They hope they will continue to get more bookings. At this time they are usually booked solid until late August or early September. 

Elk Antler’s Ed Kiesling said, “Right now it’s pretty good. Things started getting better in mid-June. It depends upon the day whether they have openings or have to turn customers away. Looking into the future it’s hard to know as people are making reservations only a day or two before they plan to arrive or the day of.” 

Days Inn’s Jenni Dorman said, “Right now we are doing very well. We’ve been full pretty much every night for the past two-and-a-half weeks.”

The demographics of the customers are from all over the United States. There are almost no international tourists due to the shutdowns across the country and around the globe. Tour buses have canceled. However, there have been just a couple of international tourists. A French couple visited Thermopolis on the Fourth of July, and one business said they had some tourists from Russia.

One difference between this year and previous years is that this year the drop off of reservations has appeared to be much, much earlier. There are not as many bookings later into the fall. 

Dorman said, “The future next week is not great. Sturgis starts next Saturday and I would think on a normal year we would be booked for the first three weeks of August and we are not even close right now. It’s taken a dive as of Monday.”

Regarding tourists and COVID while staying in town, Dorman said, “the customers are surprised to see restaurants open here in town. They are glad because some places they’ve driven through that there is nothing open. So, they’re thankful for that.”