Vail hosts travel writers, editors for Travel Classics West Conference

Starting Thursday, Sept. 22, the town of Vail played host to the 28^th annual Travel Classics West Conference, bringing with it around 55 editors and writers from publications like National Geographic Travel, Condé Nast Traveler and AFAR.  

“The Vail Local Marketing District is really responsible for promoting the destination during the non-ski months for the most part — that’s their main emphasis — and so, one of the reasons we’re hosting this group of writers right now is so they can really see Vail in the fall, which is an opportunity for us to enhance and promote this time of year,” said Kristin Yantis, owner of Malen Yantis Public Relations, which represents the town’s marketing district.

“Destinations all over the world vie to host this event in their location and we’re just really fortunate to be able to have such an important group of travel writers here and that we can inspire to hopefully write stories down the road.”

Throughout the week, the conference — which is taking place at the Grand Hyatt in Vail — provides attendees the opportunity to network with each other and attend closed sessions and talks, but then also to engage with the destination itself.

Vail has been a sponsor of three previous Travel Classics conferences elsewhere, which provided the town access and an opportunity to network with travel writers in the past. However, the goal has always been to host the event in Vail, Yantis said.

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“This conference moves all over the world and it’s a real honor to be able to host this conference in any destination,” Yantis said. “We started attending this conference about three years ago and we know the quality of media and editors that attend this conference, so we knew that eventually, we wanted to bring this conference to Vail to be able to showcase what the destination is all about to this very important group of editors and travel writers.”

Past destinations for the event have included Whistler, British Columbia, Scottsdale, Arizona, and Lausanne, Switzerland.

Over the course of the three-day conference, Vail has worked to give writers opportunities to “experience what a visit to Vail is all about and the Vail experience.”

This included, on Friday night, hosting a dinner at the Four Seasons — with a presentation by Mayor Kim Langmaid — as well as providing a history tour of Vail Village, led by the Colorado Snowsports Museum.

“We have various partners who have created activations around the Village to be able to tell them about the history of Vail. I think one of the biggest questions we always get, one of the most popular questions is: ‘Why is Vail a Bavarian Village?’” Yantis said. “So, we wanted them to experience the village, have the opportunity to tour around the village and hear first-hand from the volunteers at the Snowsports Museum, the real authentic history of this area.”

Additionally, members of the Colorado Tourism Office will host the group on Saturday evening at 4 Eagle Ranch. And while attendees had some opportunity to experience Vail over Thursday, Friday and Saturday, many of the conference’s attendees also arrived early or plan to stay after to participate in other experiences and trips in the valley.  

The activities and opportunities presented to attendees included a llama lunch hike with Paragon Guides, dinner at the Vail Village restaurants, a photo tour of the mountains around Vail, the Sunday Farmer’s Market, the inaugural Climb for Climate on Saturday, mountain bike rentals, guided hikes and more.

“We’ve given them the wide variety of options to provide them with a general idea of all the amazing things that you can do while you’re visiting Vail,” Yantis said.

“We want to highlight unique aspects of the Vail experience that they would find of interest to go back and write stories.”

While the event is hosted by the town of Vail and the local marketing district, Yantis said that it was really a “community-wide effort” to bring these Vail experiences to the attendees.

“We’ve pulled in a lot of different partners to make this possible. We have different hotels and restaurants that have been a part of the pre- and post-visits,” she said. “It’s truly been a community-wide effort that our lodging community, our restaurant community has really supported, understanding what an important group this is.”

And hopefully, the conference will bring benefits to the town in the “weeks and months down the road as stories start to appear,” Yantis said.

“The overall benefit, in the long run, is a lot of positive publicity about the destination, which in turn inspires people to travel here as they’re researching opportunities and different destinations that they can visit,” she added.

Vail Marketing looks ahead

This conference represents one of the public relations efforts by the town to promote Vail as a destination, part of a whole suite of operations, programs and initiatives led by the local marketing district. On Tuesday, Sept. 20, the Vail Town Council convened as the marketing district board to approve the district’s 2023 operating plan.

Heading into 2023, the marketing district will look to continue to optimize visitation of its “target guests” — which are defined as “high-net-worth” individuals between the ages of 45 and 64, married with older children and are active with a desire for luxury and cultural arts and events. It seeks to grow the quality of its data to optimize content and “enhance guest engagement and loyalty;” embrace the notion of destination stewardship to protect Vail’s natural assets while elevating the guest experience; and position Vail as unique against other mountain resort communities.

While the district’s budget for 2023 will be approved in December 2022 as part of the town’s annual budgetary process, it is projected to be around $4.7 million, a $155,964 decrease over 2022.

In meeting these goals, the marketing district intends to continue its “Life is But a Dream” marketing campaign, which it launched in 2022. The campaign is designed to encourage guests and visitors to live out their dreams in Vail. This message, according to the Sept. 20 presentation on the campaign, will also be able to integrate with the Destination Stewardship Plan once complete.

“I think Vail being a global leader in destination stewardship and really trying to understand what that means and to put the systems in place is no easy task for the communications team. It’s really a challenge and people around the world are trying to figure that out,” Langmaid said.

“I encourage us to think about the circular economy when it comes to marketing because we’re spending all of this money on getting people here, then how are we keeping it just as great through destination stewardship and maintaining the quality of experience and the trails and the wildlife — all those things that make Vail so special and unique. It’s just an important thing to be thinking about,” she added.