While we aren’t willing to go as far as Gaylord Entertainment’s chief executive Colin Reed in dismissing a report by downtown Denver opponents of the company’s proposed 1,500-room hotel and convention complex in Aurora, we’re not happy with it, either.
“The report is skewed,” Reed said. “It’s obviously the best report money can buy, but it’s not based on facts.”
In our view, the report’s problem is not so much that it’s short on facts. Indeed, it appears chock full of facts and figures, although not all of those that might be relevant.
No, what the report, commissioned by Denver’s convention and visitor’s bureau and released Tuesday, mainly seems to lack is vision, optimism and a broad perspective. Its analysis gets lost in the trees of parochial thinking and never bothers to notice the forest of regional cooperation and the overall economy.
What it is missing, in short, is the overarching reality: A premier tourist and convention magnet unlike anything in this state is eager to locate near DIA, far from downtown. Over time, it will lure literally hundreds of thousands of tourists who otherwise would never set foot in this state and spawn new commercial development in the area.
And this is controversial? Why — especially when Colorado is scratching for every new job?
The report says that the “Gaylord Rockies will meet or exceed the overall quality level and physical plant” of “all of the major group house hotels currently operating in the Denver marketplace.” And it acknowledges Gaylord would be “located well outside the generally accepted bounds of the ‘Downtown Denver’ competitive market.”
The report goes on to claim that Gaylord initially will cannibalize one-third of its business from existing hotels. Yet history elsewhere offers no clear-cut lesson. As the report itself admits, it’s difficult to quantify how the opening of Gaylord hotels in Washington, Orlando and greater Dallas/Fort Worth affected occupancy rates because of how unexpected events intervened.
Why should we be confident of a forecast involving the final years of this decade when it’s so difficult to look back and determine the impact of previous Gaylord openings?
Moreover, the report is dour almost to a fault. At one point, for example, it claims the “potential for negative impacts likely extends beyond the four year projection period, and the Denver hotel market may never fully be mitigated.”
Never
? Sorry, but we have more confidence in the resilience of hotel and convention officials and their capacity to grow their businesses.
In the short term, no doubt, a Gaylord hotel may well attract some bookings that otherwise would have ended up downtown. So it may depress — temporarily, we would emphasize — the central occupancy rate. And of course this issue must be considered because Gaylord is seeking state subsidies under the Regional Tourism Act.
Still, it’s hard to see how any “extraordinary” new tourist magnet could be expected to hold every business harmless. That’s not the real world. Nor is the real world a place where a state would willfully pass up an opportunity of this magnitude.
