January 26, 2012

SandBox Comments: Aspen Daily News "Winter X Games impact a multimillion dollar question"

Carolyn Sackariason:

"The Winter X Games are all about going big, and Aspen on Saturday will do just that, based on lodging occupancy reports, which suggest town will be 97 percent full.

“Aspen is as close to completely sold out as I’ve ever seen it, although we can still find some rooms and condos in Snowmass, whose occupancy according to this report is peaking around 80 percent,” Bill Tomcich, president of central reservations agency Stay Aspen Snowmass (SAS), said in an email.

He noted that Saturday’s numbers are the highest he’s ever seen since SAS started tracking nightly occupancies in 2006. There are only a “handful” of rooms available in Aspen and the occupancy report is based on a sampling of 65 percent of 2,304 rentable units in Aspen, Tomcich said.

Before ESPN brought the X Games to Buttermilk in 2002, the last weekend of January and the beginning of February were not considered to be peak times for the resort.

From Jan. 21-28, 2001, the year prior to the X Games coming here, occupancy in Aspen was 73 percent, while the week of Jan. 29-Feb. 5 was 69 percent, according to Tomcich. He noted that at the time, there was no ability to track occupancy rates on a nightly basis so the above numbers are not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Neither the city of Aspen nor the Aspen Chamber Resort Association (ACRA) have done any analysis on what the Winter X Games contribute to the local economy since 2007..."

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