No Show

No Showed: National Parks, Shutdowns, And Local Economies

• Jeff Borman and Matt Brown

Share episode

A short episode this week on the quite unique, very sad U.S. government approach to tourism and park spaces. How much money are the parks losing, how much are the towns around the parks losing? And what's going on with international visitors, Brand USA, and U.S. passports. We are fired up!

SPEAKER_00:

Jeff, weren't you talking like about a week ago that you were going to head out and see some of the national parks in October?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I was. Um, Mammoth Cave National Park, Hot Springs, Ozark National Forest, National Parks. I've been to Mammoth.

SPEAKER_00:

I have not been to Hot Springs. Well, how were they? So give me a little give me a little the the info on them.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I can describe them thoroughly over the next 10 seconds, Matt. I can boil it every detail of my experience into the next 10 seconds. Are you ready? Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow, that that sounds amazing. That blank silence.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I believe you were headed on a special trip to see national parks also in North Dakota.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, Badlands, Wind Cave, Roosevelt.

SPEAKER_01:

Tell me, tell me, give me every detail of the national parks this month. Sure. Yeah, yeah, bring it.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, here it is.

SPEAKER_01:

Riveting.

SPEAKER_00:

I know. Listeners, you may have noticed that there are some blank spaces in what we're talking about, and that's because there's been a government shutdown. You may have read about this in the news. And what happens in a government shutdown? The first images you see in papers and media, any kind of media representation of the shutdown, it's the national parks are closed. Ah, our jewels like Yosemite and Yellowstone closed down. Think of the children. Think of our stewardship of the earth. And it's used as a political pinata, as are many things. But the national parks are a particularly useful tool for media and for politicians to talk about government stalemate, and it drives us absolutely bananas. Now, here's the good news the National Park Service is actually still very much alive. More than 350 of our national park units out of about 430, 433, something like that, are functioning in some way or another. You can still visit them. There are a lot of trails that are still open. Part of that is due to a robust and very committed volunteer service. I was just out at Devil's Tower in Wyoming about a week ago, and the volunteers were doing their best to kind of help out the few rangers that are left there. Like at a lot of the parks, you know, the visitor center is shut down, search and rescue is very limited, trash collection is very limited, fee collection is non-existent. You see a lot of rule breaking, like people bringing dogs out. That's a big no-no, base jumping, but you will see law enforcement. They've kept those on in emergency capacity just so that people just don't start running wild and chopping down trees and going crazy out there. The real issue here with this shutdown, as it is with a lot of things, is that it comes down to money. And the NPS is estimating one million in fee revenue for every day that a government shutdown keeps the parks closed. Up at Acadia in Maine, you know, typically the park makes about one and a half million bucks in entrance fees alone in the month of October. And so all that revenue is gone. And, you know, the park system already runs on a shoestring because it gets cut and cut and cut. Again, political pinata. Everybody likes to tout it as America's best idea, but we never like to fund it. So here we are, stuck with these with this situation in DC and uh these spaces that uh need our care more than ever.

SPEAKER_01:

It's not just the parks, uh revenues that are lost here. Most of these parks aren't naturally out on their own. The local communities around them, those local economies, are suffering big time. The NPCA, the National Parks Conservation Association, uh put a number out that they estimate 80 million a day lost to those local economies that exist to service park visitors. In 2013, when we had a 16-day shutdown, it was estimated that 400 million was lost in visitor spending during that period of time. So uh, while our government can't figure out how to operate, it's not just its own revenues uh that are that are suffering here. Uh it is the local economies that rely on the parks to be serviced and open. And local experience is you know, people like me and you, Matt, who are out there planning vacations in October to go see our national parks.

SPEAKER_00:

And here we are. Like schmucks. I don't know why we're doing this.

SPEAKER_01:

Knocking on the door.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, let us in. And yeah, I mean, there are a thousand towns out there that are essentially like the town in Jaws, like Amity Island. They depend on the tourist for, I mean, like one month out of the year pays for the entire year. It keeps businesses afloat.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. National parks aren't the only government-induced travel problem here, right? The administration's war on the travel industry all year long. Uh let's shift the conversation to international arrivals, right? Industry has seen American inbound travel visitation, August year date down two percent year over year. Uh that excludes land arrivals from Canada and Mexico, who are our largest travel trade partners. Uh, and it would be far worse than down two percent if we were to include Canada and Mexico as well. And when we look at the countries that aren't coming, Denmark down 70%, Canada by flight, down 59%, Germany, right? Let's start actually just let's start with the first two. Denmark and Canada. Why are those countries down 70 and 60 percent in travel to the United States? I don't know, Matt. Maybe it's because we told them we would annex them. I don't know. It doesn't go over well in the home country. Uh Germany down 50%, right? I mean, the whole there are 10 countries that are down uh 40% or more. Uh globally, the average is 37% fewer people desiring to come to the United States. The government is not helping this industry.

SPEAKER_00:

For all the reportage of the shutdown, you know, they go to real red meat topics like manufacturing and consumer goods. I see news stories about how travel is down, but I don't see stories about how government policy and the whims of the government are affecting tourism. And I wonder why that's not a story. I wonder if everybody's scared. Yeah. Or I don't know what's going on.

SPEAKER_01:

What I do have confidence in saying is that the US government does not care about the travel industry. That's very clear. Our inbound travel to the US is 80% of what it was in 19. Our reputation has never recovered. This is a good time to mention this is a bipartisan problem. It's being exacerbated right now. But our government is one of the very few that doesn't have a ministry of tourism, for example, right? We don't try, as big as this industry is, to bring people into the US.

SPEAKER_00:

I wonder why. I wonder if we've just had it so good for so long and we assume that everybody wants to visit here. An increasingly suspect assumption.

SPEAKER_01:

I think it's easy for any government, anytime around the world, and frankly, in the course of history, to whip up demand for its own agenda by pointing the finger at external forces. Right, right. Always been true, and it will remain true. The short-term nature of our government's thinking is particularly damaging to the travel industry that relies on people to want to come here.

SPEAKER_00:

To wit, Jeff. This year the U.S. has banned citizens from a bunch of countries entirely and made getting a visa significantly more difficult and expensive, even for our so-called allies, used to be allies. There's now a$250 visa integrity fee enacted this year. And that sounds so that sounds so much like a thing an airline would charge, or like a resort fee. And although this fee is refundable, its implementation can only deter visitors. The U.S. National Parks instituted a foreign visitors fee this year.

SPEAKER_01:

So all these fees, it's like how much more clearly can you tell visitors to stay away? Exactly. Through a dozen different policies. The federal government has told the rest of the world to fuck off, right? Uh U.S. domestic travel business is feeling that pain because people don't want to accompany a place that's so unwelcoming.

SPEAKER_00:

One of our obsessions here is tracking passports for the first time in the 20-year history of the Henley Passport Index. The U.S. is no longer amongst the 10 most powerful passports in the world. We have fallen to 12th. The index measures the number of countries a traveler can visit without needing a visa. Singapore's first, and it's followed pretty immediately by South Korea and Japan. Afghanistan is last.

SPEAKER_01:

Now we're trending toward Afghanistan, Matt.

SPEAKER_00:

We are. We are 12th. You know, we're still top 20, but I don't know.

SPEAKER_01:

At least the Taliban's got a visit Afghanistan campaign. In 2014, U.S. passport ranked number one. It wasn't that long ago. And it has fallen steadily every year since. The recent Henley report attributes the tumble in part to the Trump administration's immigration policy. That's not a shock. Uh, but countries like Brazil, for example, have also removed U.S. travelers from its visa-free list due to a lack of reciprocity. So holding the passport you and I have is no longer nearly as easy to move around the world.

SPEAKER_00:

Even our stabs at trying to have an official government tourism entity are going nowhere. Our marketing agency, which should be hard at work promoting inbound travel from overseas, it's called brand USA, and it's had 80% of its budget stripped away. And I think that happened like in April of this year. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

The ESTA fees, right? Those are the costs that foreigners pay to arrive. Uh those doubled. So since these fees are specifically earmarked to fund brand USA, they've doubled the collection and cut the funding. Huh.

SPEAKER_00:

Curious. Uh, funding crisis or not, brand USA is launching a global campaign called America the Beautiful, and it's highlighting American beaches, national parks, and cities. And there's a warm narrator offering travelers, quote, this great big open arms hug of a land that has also, quote, a million moments to offer. Indeed, it does. I feel many of those million moments uh every day.

SPEAKER_01:

I felt them at our national parks last month. Good luck, right? Yes. This is what we should be doing. We should be out marketing, visit the U.S., and especially our biggest gems, these parks. But good luck, right? I mean, let's any tagline would be better for tourism than America First. It's a pretty big middle finger of the rest of the world. Uh through a dozen different policies, a few that we've named already, uh, we've told the rest of the world to go away. Our businesses are feeling a pain for it. I mean, again, as a reminder, my loathing for both parties is equal. Uh, we we don't have an effective government that works for Americans. Uh and I believe they've stopped collecting Matt. Have they stopped collecting taxes during the shutdown? Are you still paying taxes?

SPEAKER_00:

I am.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I am true. I am true.

SPEAKER_00:

As you can tell, everybody, we're fired up. Why? Because we love this country and we love its beauty, and uh we deserve better, folks. I think that should be our new. I think that maybe brand USA should have that as the new motto. We deserve better, everybody. I could get I can actually kind of get behind that. If you do get a chance to get out there and check your local listings, because I feel a few brave souls are are are keeping the flame alive. And I think we need we need to support these spaces now more than ever.