If you’re in Boise, take a look around. There’s a very good chance some of the people you see are out-of-towners. June and July are Boise’s busiest months for tourism.
The Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau keeps track of how many hotel rooms get rented and when. Visitors bureau director Carrie Westergard says both in June and July the city could have as many visitors as residents.
Last July, Boise hotels and motels rented more than 122,000 “room nights.” Westergard says the average is two people per room, which comes to nearly 245,000 people if each stay was just one night. Boise’s population is 214,000.
The winter months are the slowest with about half the summer numbers.
But Westergard says beyond how many hotel rooms are occupied, tourism officials don’t know much about the people who visit Boise. She hopes to obtain some grant money from the state this year to do research on who is coming to Boise, and why.
“We really want to zero in on the business versus the leisure travelers,” She says. “We’d love to know – is it 70 percent corporate business and 30 percent leisure? And why are they coming? And how did they hear about it. There’s a lot of different questions that we have.”
Other questions could include how many leisure travels are coming just to Boise and how many are visiting Boise and other places in Idaho on the same trip.
For more local news, follow @KBSX915
Copyright 2015 Boise State Public Radio