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Travel and Tourism director still loves the view
Sheridan Press, Saturday, January 29, 2005Top 25 movers, shakers and newsmakers
Shelley Ridenour
The irony just can’t escape Penny Becker.
Every day when Becker goes to her job as the executive director of Sheridan Travel and Tourism, in an office located at the visitor information center on Fifth Street, she remembers her first glimpse of Sheridan.
It was at that very spot.
Becker and her husband, Mont, were traveling to see their daughter who lives on the West Coast and passed through Wyoming. They pulled off the highway for a rest stop at the visitor information center "and fell in love with the place," she said.
"We looked at each other and said, 'Yeah, I could live here,'" she said.
Six months later the Beckers had moved from Minnesota to Sheridan, and another six months later Penny was working at the visitor center.
When Penny Becker goes to her job as the executive director of Sheridan Travel and Tourism, in an office located at the visitor information center on Fifth Street, she remembers her first glimpse of Sheridan. It was at that very spot.
Becker is pleased with the direction the travel and tourism effort is headed in Sheridan.
She’s gone from having one brochure about the community, which was placed in a standard manila file folder with a hand-typed label and supplemented with other paperwork, to a themed campaign of professionally designed promotional pieces.
In fact the promotional designs keep evolving, and just in the last month or so the latest look has been unveiled. It focuses attention on outdoor opportunities, history, Western events and attractions in Sheridan using gold and rust colors, a change from the blue and red used on past printed pieces.
"One of my goals was to bring us up to a more professional appearance, and we did it," she said.
Becker won’t take much credit for any of the Sheridan Travel and Tourism office successes, though. She says it’s due to the seven-member board that oversees the operations of her office and the partnerships that have been forged with local businesses and tourist attractions, as well as state, national and international travel organizations.
The travel and tourism office is funded through the lodging tax in Sheridan. Voters in November approved a higher "bed tax," and on April 1 it will double to 4 percent.
Nearly three months after the vote, Becker is still genuinely appreciative of Sheridan residents’ decision.
"That was a phenomenal vote of support," she said. "The board and I are excited that the community supports our work."
While it’s tough to predict if revenues will exactly double, because there’s no way to know if the number of motel guests will stay steady compared to last year, Becker is counting on more money to spend next fiscal year.
Lodging tax collections last year totaled $186,000, she said, and there are many factors that contribute to higher tax collections.
Among them are increased print advertising in magazines and newspapers including SnoWest, National Geographic Traveler, Sunset and True West. The current travel and tourism budget includes $65,000 for print advertisements in publications with circulations totaling 14 million, Becker said.
Becker has lured travel writers from many newspapers and magazines to Sheridan, and their stories have run in publications with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, she said.
Getting that free advertising in the form of news stories "is key to what we do," she said.
There are also now 12 billboards scattered along Interstate 25 and Interstate 90 in Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota, all promoting various Sheridan activities.
Improvements are continuously being made to the travel and tourism Web site, she said, which averages 10,000 visitors a month.
With summer visitation numbers looking good, Becker is focusing more attention now on attracting tourists to Sheridan at other times of the year.
Winter snowmobiling is a good example, she said. The Big Horn Mountains consistently rank high on various snowmobiling association lists as a good snowmobiling site, and those people visit Sheridan at a less busy time of year.
As well, she’s working to make Sheridan a destination for people with other interests including history and outdoor activities.
"I see our tourism industry just expanding," Becker said.
