the Lake Chelan municipal Golf Course | 2021
There are two major industries at the heart of the Lake Chelan Valley (the Valley) economy– agriculture and tourism. These include apple growers, wineries (at the intersection of the agriculture and tourism industries), golf, and natural amenities, such as Lake Chelan and the Columbia River. Tourism attracts over 2 million visitors annually, and it is estimated that visitors spend $417 million per year, supporting about 5,000 jobs. The Valley’s five golf courses– Lake Chelan, Gamble Sands, Bear Mountain Ranch, Rock Island, and Alta Lake– attract tourists from around the world, contributing to the larger tourism economy. The City of Chelan, which owns and operates the Lake Chelan Golf Course (LCGC), commissioned Earth Economics to perform a study on the golf course’s economic impact and contribution to the regional economy.
Our analysts were challenged in determining the number of nonlocal golfers who played at the LCGC (versus those who live in the Chelan Valley), because the course does not track golfers’ home locations (nor do they know the duration of trips by nonlocals, or how much they spend during their visit). To address this, we acquired device locational data for the area defined by 33 miles of driving distance from Chelan’s city center. The acquired data allows us to geolocate devices based on voluntarily shared data from user apps. By reviewing the home ZIP codes of the unique devices appearing on the LCGC links, we were able to identify the proportion of local and nonlocal golfers, which we then scaled by the total number of rounds played each year, as recorded in the LCGC reservation system. The pattern of device locations throughout each 24-hour period allowed us to then estimate the number of day and overnight tourists for each golfing season.
This data also allowed us to observe changes in golf tourist movement. Most notable was a decrease in the number of unique devices in full-service restaurants, and an increase in grocery stores and limited-service restaurants. We note that while business in some sectors saw a decrease in the percentage of tourists visiting their businesses, this was outweighed by the overall increase in golf tourism, which increased spending across all sectors.
This study finds Lake Chelan Golf Course (LCGC) has a substantial and positive impact on the Chelan Valley economy, through both its operations and the golf tourism spending that the course drives. The increase in golf participation during the COVID-19 pandemic provided an unexpected economic boost; total rounds played at the LCGC increased from 18,131 in 2019 to 21,389 in 2020, an 18 percent increase.
This analysis reveals a 49 percent increase in golf tourism days in 2020 over the prior year—not only are there more tourists golfing, but they also stay in the region for longer periods. This led to an additional $4.2 million in tourism dollars entering the study area. The LCGC attracts visitors from around the world, but most visitors arrive from the state’s most populous region, the Seattle- Tacoma-Olympia corridor. The average LCGC visitor spent an estimated $326 each day of their trip, though overnight visitors spent significantly more, at $357 for each overnight stay compared with only $61 for each day visit.
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