Is Sustainable Tourism Possible?

As Western mountain towns struggle with overtourism, Jackson Hole tries out a new plan to mitigate visitors’ impacts

By Sarah Tory, High Country News

People leaving the Old Fatihful viewing area after an eruption. (courtesy: Yellowstone National Park)

For years, Crista Valentino felt uncomfortable about how Jackson, Wyoming, her adopted home, promoted itself as a tourist destination. Ads showed cringe-worthy montages of frolicking bear cubs and jagged peaks in nearby Grand Teton National Park. “I always felt a little bit icky, like we were marketing Jackson as a commodity,” she said.

This article originally appeared in High Country News.

The Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board was primarily responsible. Established in 2011 to promote tourism during the slower months, it ran ad campaigns funded by 60% of Teton County’s portion of the state’s lodging tax. By the time Valentino became a board member in 2017, tourism was booming even as complaints about “over-tourism” rose among Jackson’s roughly 10,700 year-round residents.

When the pandemic hit, tourism reached record highs, with 50,000 daily visitors — nearly five per resident. Traffic soared, long lines formed outside restaurants and workers were overwhelmed and exhausted. Tourists thronged the outdoors, hiking and camping in non-designated areas and leaving behind human waste and trash.

In August 2021, the board started working on a Sustainable Destination Management Plan (SDMP), the first in the state to focus on sustainable tourism. Other Western mountain towns — like Park City, Utah, Breckenridge, Colorado, and Big Sky, Montana — have faced similar booms and developed similar plans to address overtourism. Meanwhile, outnumbered locals find themselves wondering who benefits from the hordes of visitors — and whether they are wanted at all.

VALENTINO, WHO BECAME the Tourism Board’s executive director in 2023, jokes that on Monday, she’ll get a call complaining about tourists, while on Tuesday, someone else will call grumbling about business and lamenting a lack of visitors. The big challenge of the SDMP planning process, she says, was to thread the needle between those two camps. Like it or not, tourism drives a large chunk of the local economy, generating $1.7 billion in travel-related spending and 8,198 tourism-related jobs in 2023. Local businesses feared the SDMP might put a cap on the number of tourists.

“We had to do a lot of work to say, ‘No, no, no, we’re not anti-tourism at all,’” Valentino said. “What we’re getting at is actually just better-managed tourism.”

In January 2023, the board adopted its final SDMP. Its initiatives encompassed plans to improve residents’ quality of life by upgrading public transportation to alleviate congestion and building more affordable housing. It aimed to better manage tourists, spurring a “selfie control” campaign to educate people about maintaining an appropriate distance from wildlife. The plan also called for signage and messaging explaining the importance of staying on-trail and extinguishing campfires to reduce wildfire risk. Recently, Valentino said, Grand Teton National Park’s superintendent told her that this would help land managers weather the summer tourism season, especially in the wake of the Trump administration’s budget cuts, which eliminated 16 of the park’s 17 supervisory positions.

Taylor Phillips, founder and owner of Jackson Hole EcoTour Adventures, believes the SDMP could ultimately benefit the tourism industry. The boom has been great for his business, but, like other locals, he’s noticed the impact. People come to Wyoming for nature, he said, and “if the health and the quality of their experiences dwindle over time, it’s going to have detrimental impacts to the larger (Jackson) travel and tourism industry.”

Critics, however, think the SDMP ignores the root cause of the problem: the millions the tourism board still invests in “destination marketing.” In fiscal year 2024, nearly $3.7 million went toward advertising, though a portion focused on education. “You’re spending money to create problems that the other hand is going to spend money to try and resolve,” said Alan Henderson, who retired to Jackson Hole in 2005.

A 2022 survey organized by the travel and tourism board suggested that locals agree: Only 26% of the nearly 5,000 respondents said tourism’s benefits outweighed its drawbacks. Even more telling, 61% said they’d be willing to pay more taxes if it meant having fewer visitors. (In 2023, the lodging tax covered $9,833 worth of public services for each household in Teton County.) At a 2022 public meeting about the survey, Henderson asked about ending advertising spending altogether. A tourism board representative said that wasn’t possible without changing the organization’s bylaws. Henderson left the meeting.

Valentino still believes the solution isn’t ending advertising, but changing it. Over the last several years, she noted, the board has shifted toward educational messaging emphasizing stewardship, with slogans like “Take care of what takes your breath away.” Ultimately, Grand Teton and Yellowstone are “Bucket List” trips. “People are going to come here whether we market or not,” she said. “If you’re not driving the narrative, then someone else will.”