Wright County makes significant contribution
All over America, tourism is a major business. And so it goes without saying that any business which makes up .2% of its home state's total tourism income is a highly successful business. Taken as a whole, that's what Wright County's tourism business did in 2021, as shown in the recently released Iowa Tourism Office Economic Impact Report, which tallies up the numbers from that year.
Iowa brought in $6.1 billion in direct visitor spending to the state economy through travel and tourism related industries. Wright County brought in 13.21 million of those dollars, while the county's tourism industry had revenues over $20 million in total.
Statewide, $1.369 billion of the $6.1 billion in total direct visitor spending went to food and beverage sales, $1.137 billion went to lodging, $959 million went to recreation, $1,067 billion went to retail, and $1,615 billion went to transportation.
Based on Wright County's total share of the statewide impact, we can estimate that $2.738 million was brought into the county from food and beverage sales, $2.274 million was brought in from lodging, $1.918 million from recreation, $2.134 million from retail, and $3.23 million from transportation.
Funds brought into the state from out of state circulate through the local economy, then cycle up through the Iowa economy. That does a massive amount of good locally, starting with creating jobs. In Wright County, tourism was directly responsible for 66 jobs, the report estimates, while indirectly about 99 jobs were created by tourism dollars.
Tourist dollars also pay taxes, ranging from sales taxes, to lodging taxes, to fuel taxes and more. Those tax dollars fund local initiatives like roads, law enforcement, fire departments, and EMS services. And a greater measure of those tax dollars go to the local economy than the state economy. In Wright County, tourists directly paid $1.07 million in local taxes, $.98 million in state taxes.
Prior to the COVID pandemic tourism employment had repeatedly surpassed employment growth in other industries, growing 13.3% from 2010 to 2019, in contrast to just 8.0% in overall job growth statewide.
But then, early in 2020 nearly one of every four Iowa tourism jobs was lost due to the pandemic, 24% in all. However, Iowa rebounded quickly, replacing roughly half of the lost jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector by June of that same year. By the end of 2021, the sector had nearly completely rebounded, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and completed its rebound by October of 2021 – just in time for the holidays.
