NWI Tourism Investments Continue to Pay Off | Latest titles

While national and state parks once attracted 3 million visitors a year, the renaming of the national park in 2019 has paid off. The two parks now attract 5 million visitors a year.

Indiana Dunes National Park is one of the 25 most visited properties in the National Park Service system. With 3.2 million visitors a year, it ranks 24th, tied with Cape Hatteras National Seashore and a short distance from Yosemite National Park, with 3.3 million visitors, according to the NPS website.

“I think the national park draws people from all over,” said Jack Arnett, executive director of Visit Michigan City LaPorte. Stand in a parking lot or on a trail and ask visitors where they are from. They come from all over the United States and beyond.”

The park is a savior for the tourism industry.

“We calculated that our industry lost $70 million” during the pandemic, said Lorelei Weimer, executive director of Indiana Dunes Tourism. Without the Dunes, “we would have lost $140 million, easily.”

Paul Labovitz, director of the National Park Service, Indiana Dunes National Park, is an entrepreneur at heart. The annual budget for its Uncle Sam Park is $10-11 million per year. Between Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties, tourism brings in well over $1 billion, he said. It’s an incredible return on investment.

“We don’t know if we have 5 million people coming here once or one person coming here 5 million times,” Labovitz said.

With mandatory passes to enter the national park, it will be interesting to see over the next three to five years how this affects tourist numbers. Park staff can tell where the cars are going but not who and why.

The park is the number one attraction, but it’s not the only one. Tourist boards like Indiana Dunes Tourism in Porter County try to let visitors know that there is much more to see and do in the area.

This translates into places to stay.

LaPorte County is the third-largest county in the state when it comes to the availability of third-party vacation rentals like Airbnb and Vrbo, according to Arnett.

“I think that’s an unknown quantity for us in the industry,” he said. Front desks like his thought putting their heads in beds meant filling hotel rooms. But there are also beds elsewhere.

Homeowners in Airbnb and similar schemes have to pay the innkeeper tax, just like their competitors in hotels and bed and breakfasts, and that money is reinvested to attract tourism.

“We pushed for this for a long time,” Arnett said. ” It is enormous. He added, over the course of a year, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“The future of LaPorte County is figuring out those vacation rentals, how to market them.”

Different counties go about attracting tourists in different ways.

“When I came into this industry, everyone said stay out of the way, stay in your lane,” Arnett said. “We found this niche in LaPorte.

The county visitors bureau sponsors events like major boat races in addition to promoting the events of others.

Youth sports are also important in Lake County. The South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority helps book events as well as rooms for attendees.

In Porter County, tourism promotion includes improving the Indiana Dunes Visitor Center, which Indiana Dunes Tourism operates in partnership with the National Park Service.

The national park is very important in Porter County, spanning the entire county. With the park’s renaming, visitors are wondering about hiking opportunities and not just beaches, Weimer said.

“They come earlier in the season and they stay longer,” she said.

The visitor center has longer summer hours and shorter winter hours, with staff appropriate for the ebb and flow of tourists who flock to the facility. As the park’s off-season gets shorter and shorter, the visitor center will have to adjust its hours to accommodate the influx of visitors in the spring and fall, Weimer said.

His agency invests in the reception center which is a great success and reinvents the space.

The interior was once dominated by shelves of tourist brochures. These were moved to another room to make their first impression of the building — and the park — more meaningful, Weimer said.

The center aims to intercept visitors and help them better plan their time during their visit. Above all, it must be welcoming and engaging.

Weimer is excited about an Aboriginal cultural trail that would start at the visitor center. Engineering is underway for this project.

Included is a shelter which would provide a chance to do outdoor events at the center.

“They’re all game changers,” she said.

Nichols Tourism Group estimated that the visitor center redesign and new trail could drive about $20 million in new visitor spending annually for Porter County businesses, Weimer said.

Weimer and his counterparts in Lake and LaPorte counties want visitors to have a good time at the Dunes, but they also want visitors to explore other areas.

“We need to integrate them into our communities. We have to get them through the night,” she said.

“The visitors are there. They have already chosen to be here,” Weimer said. “The trick is to engage them, to get them to venture south on Interstate 94 to see what else the area has to offer.”

Helping visitors find out what else there is to do south of the Dunes is key to spreading that tourist revenue.

“If I’m in Hebron, I want to think about having that Indiana Dunes brand,” she said. “Communities don’t benefit enough from having the Dunes in their backyards.”

LaPorte County and its neighbors offer several traditional destinations. Lake Michigan is the most obvious — “We call it the Indiana Ocean,” Arnett said — but there’s also Blue Chip Hotel and Casino, Premium Outlets, youth sports and more.

“The future of LaPorte County is figuring out those vacation rentals, how to market them,” he said. “We see this as a regional approach.”

Stay in one place and you have a home base for explorations through the region. This includes not only outstanding national, state and local parks – Michigan City’s Washington Park, with its beaches, lighthouse, zoo and marina is a major draw – but also home games at the University of Notre Dame , Amish country travel, agritourism like Fair Oaks Farms and Suite.

Just as Indiana Dunes Tourism invests in the visitor center, the National Park Service invests in national park properties.

The entry fee won’t be enforced through a heavy-handed approach — “it’s a hell of a way to enjoy the park,” Labovitz said — but it will generate much-needed funds for park maintenance.

The park has fewer employees than three years ago, Labovitz said. Congress continues to pass ongoing resolutions to fund parks at previous funding levels, but employees need increases, and other costs are rising as well. This extra expense must be accommodated, but by cutting somewhere in the budget.

“We can barely take care of the park as it is, now that it is 55 years old,” he said.

The fees are controversial, with many people unwilling to pay for what they’ve been enjoying for free for years. But public engagement on the issue of admission fees found “pretty overwhelming support”, he said.

There are many maintenance and other park needs to be met.

Not this summer, but for the future, the National Park Service is working on plans to build cycling and pedestrian infrastructure along US 12 and the beaches, Labovitz said.

On Waverly and Mineral Springs Roads, there may be improvements for pedestrians.

“How about a trail along the road to make the trail part of the experience?” he said. The park could provide visitors with an accessible trail, perhaps an elevated boardwalk, “and not get hit by a car along Mineral Springs Road,” he said.

Another future project concerns the historic buildings of the park so that they can be opened up and reused adaptively. The Goodfellow Camp used by the Indiana Dunes Learning Center comes to mind, as does the House of Tomorrow, a 1934 World’s Fair home brought to Beverly Shores to overlook Lake Michigan.

The Bailly farm also needs help. The house was closed three years ago because it was deemed unsafe for the public.

“The house leans,” he says. “It’s nothing a few million dollars won’t solve.” It’s just a matter of money to do it. Like others in the tourism industry, Labovitz sees the wisdom in investing in the tourism industry for a major return on investment.