In 2023, 24.8 million visitors chose Colorado Springs as their travel destination.
“It has increased steadily every year,” says Alexea Veneracion, director of communications for Visit Colorado Springs. “The only year that took a dip was 2020, for obvious reasons.”
Altogether in 2023, 93.3 million tourists descended on Colorado, meaning that the Pikes Peak region accounts for more than a quarter of the tourist foot traffic — and spending — statewide.
“It’s a huge portion of that and a really great economic driver, for not just our region, but the state as a whole,” Veneracion says.
The nearly 25 million visitors are also responsible for a $2.9 billion infusion for the local economy.
“That’s a large sum of money and there are estimates that show that tourism contributes to upward of 50% of our city sales tax,” Veneracion says. “That’s pretty significant when you look also at our sales tax and what that all is used for.”
The tourism and hospitality industry is also the third-largest sector of our regional economy, responsible for roughly 40,000 jobs in the area.
Warm Welcome
Pikes Peak and Garden of the Gods remain among the top draws to the region, which has become a double-edged sword for tourism officials in the area.
“We still hear from people who ask, ‘What are the largest draws of the area?’ … We’re still really working on getting people to know all the different areas and new things to explore and to come here for,” Veneracion explains.
Visit Colorado Springs recently received grant funding from the Colorado Tourism Office to launch a new tourism marketing push dubbed the Pikes Peak Areas Project. That will divide the Pikes Peak region into 25 areas and feature an interactive map to help tourists better plan their visits.
“They’ll see all the different coffee shops, breweries, restaurants, music venues, events and things to do in each of the areas,” she explains.
Veneracion says that will allow the increasing number of guests each year to spread out from the key historic local tourism drivers, but also dive deeper into the expanding hospitality sector.
“We want them to stay longer and extend their trips and do all the other things we have here in the region,” she says.
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Among the partners helping to spread the word about all that the Pike Peak region offers is Pikes Peak Region Attractions, a nonprofit tourism marketing firm that was founded in 1973 and represents 28 local businesses in a collaborative marketing effort.
The group started from humble beginnings. Russ Wolfe, founder of the Flying W Ranch, would offer free passes and information about his and other businesses to restaurants, gas stations and other places where tourists would congregate within a day’s drive of Colorado Springs.
“We don’t drive around with brochures anymore. Most of what we do [now] is digital. The website is the No. 1 component of everything that we do, and social media drives [traffic] to that,” explains PK McPherson, PPRA executive director.
McPherson says that her organization still provides free passes to various hotels and employees of different attractions, along with providing a visitor’s guide in conjunction with Visit Colorado Springs.
One of the ways that Pikes Peak Region Attractions reaches tourists is through its YouTube channel and its 7.2 million subscribers, more than 1,102 times more than the subscribers of the Visit Colorado Springs and Colorado Tourism Office YouTube channels combined. It’s more than entertainment giant Disney has — 6.11 million subscribers.
“So, we’ve had the YouTube channel since March of 2015,” McPherson says. “I came on in December of that year. I was the second subscriber.”
The channel caught fire in August of 2023 when the subscriber count jumped from 8,000 to 47,000 subscribers over the course of the month, thanks to an 11-second video that went viral.
“It was [a] point of view
how my parents got to school, just quick clips of people riding their bikes down Pikes Peak and crossing bridges, ziplines, rafting,” she explains, noting that the video was part of a larger YouTube trend at the time, but featured many of the outdoors and adventure themes commonly associated with the Pikes Peak region.
Ryan Kost shoots and edits many of the videos, allowing him to channel his personal love for the local outdoors into content for the channel’s millions of subscribers.
“Some of my favorites are the biking tours. Biking down by Pikes Peak is one of my favorites. [At] Cave of the Winds, there’s a spelunking tour — that’s a video that I’m working on right now. It’s really, really cool being able to be underground and climb around in the mud,” Kost says.
The PPRA crew has created countless videos capturing the essence of the region — sometimes with the help of a few friends in Sasquatch suits — but there are still a few videos and views of Southern Colorado that they hope to share with the world.
“I am dying for us to do an overnight time lapse on Pikes Peak or at the Royal Gorge Bridge, even somewhere in the Garden of the Gods. We talked about a year ago [with the] Philharmonic about using some of their music as the background and I think that would be really epic,” McPherson says.
The key to developing a strong following on YouTube, and being ranked the 10th most popular travel YouTube channel in the world, comes down to the admittedly small but mighty staffers trusting their collective gut, rather than chasing trends.
“It was the shift from marketing to storytelling,” Kost says. “Let’s just tell cool stories and put it out there, and people are going to engage with that more, and then want to come live the story we told, rather than putting ads in their face.”
Year-Round Draw
Both Pikes Peak Region Attractions and Visit Colorado Springs like to remind visitors and locals alike that the tourist season has expanded beyond what many believe to be the traditional months.
“We used to see a big spike on Fourth of July and then it kind of came back down. [Recently,] we’ve really seen things level out more for the whole year,” McPherson says.
Visit Colorado Springs collects tourist data that also confirms that the city has become more of a year-round tourist destination.
“As of the last data, July through September was still the heaviest [quarter for tourist visits], we had 30% of our visitors come during those months. The second is April through June, at 26%, then October through December with 23%. And January through March is the lowest at 21%,” says Veneracion, who admits that more work can be done to flatten that curve even more.
Visit Colorado Springs plans to develop more messaging about winter-specific amenities and the plethora of options the area has for tourists of all ages over the next few years. The group has already seen successful results after shifting its marketing budget to fall-based advertising compared to just letting visitors know that we’re open for business during the summer months.
“It’s kind of like a cliché in the destination marketing world, but we really do have a little bit of everything here in Colorado Springs, in the Pikes Peak region and we have found that we do reach a really wide audience,” Veneracion says.
