›› Aurora will probably never attract the quintessential tourist. There are no water parks, roller coasters or performing arts complexes. No skyscrapers or monuments — man-made or natural — that would entice a typical sunblock-wearing, photograph-taking tourist to visit.
In fact, tourists, Denverites and journalists alike have been known to scoff at the oxymoronic idea of Aurora being a vacation spot. Visit Aurora? Well, only if I have to.
Many people still brush Aurora off as a city with vast views of short beige buildings and dusty open spaces on the way to Kansas.
But anyone with a modicum of experience within Aurora’s borders knows that what the third-largest city in Colorado does have is unique to most cities in the nation. Aurora is drawing people as tourists every day with its international cuisine, reservoirs, sports complexes, golf courses, Buckley Air Force Base and the world-renowned University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
Tourist destination? Maybe not. Visitor destination? Absolutely.
“Just because we don’t have a Disney World doesn’t mean we aren’t a destination to visitors who spend money and contribute to our economy,” said Aurora’s premier destination marketing guru, Gary Wheat.
In fact, visitors have spent enough money by staying in Aurora’s hotels that since 2010, the city has used its lodging tax revenue to pay for Wheat’s group, Visit Aurora, a nonprofit Destination Marketing Organization. The mission of the DMO is to market the city to event planners, business and leisure travelers nationwide. Before the creation of Visit Aurora, it was up to members of the Visitors Promotion Advisory Board to increase tourism efforts within the city.
As president of Visit Aurora, Wheat had lofty goals when he first set foot in his barren, white-walled office on the fifth floor of city hall. The friendly Mississippi native with an air of composure and a trademark Southern drawl came to Aurora after 11 years of experience in the field of tourism. But Aurora, by far, couldn’t have been the city with the biggest marketing challenge he ever had.
Wheat previously served as tourism director for South Bend, Ind. (home of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish); Waterloo, Iowa (yes, Waterloo); and Longmont. What was particularly appealing to Aurora officials about Wheat’s resume was that he had a proven track record of increasing hotel rooms booked during his stints as tourism director, particularly in Longmont. Under Wheat’s leadership, the Longmont Area Visitors Association for the first six months of 2010 collected about 20 percent more lodging taxes over 2009, increased the number of hotel room nights sold by 4,000 and produced 30,000 travel guides in a year.
In January 2010, Aurora officials hired him to face the tall task of elevating Aurora — Denver’s bad-mouthed stepsibling — as a destination for tourists. He’s moved away from the traditional “tourism” idea since then, perhaps realizing that Aurora might never be home to major entertainment attractions, despite city officials’ previous idealistic hopes for entertainment prospects such as Sci-Fi Land, a man-made mountain and a NASCAR racetrack. Instead, Wheat has carved out a niche for Aurora as a “visitor city.”
Over the past two years, the organization has made tangible strides in attracting visitors. Visit Aurora has helped recruit events that include softball tournaments, powerlifting competitions and an annual Sept. 11 memorial ceremony. Since 2010, Wheat and his team have helped secure 71,693 new hotel room nights and has been directly involved in recruiting 26 events scheduled over the next three years.
“We’re way ahead of where even I anticipated we’d be as an organization. I’m very proud,” said Wheat one winter day in his now lived-in office, decorated with a slew of artistic photographs of Aurora topography.
Realizing that Aurora is now anchored by the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Visit Aurora has also found a way to capitalize on the idea that Aurora is a “health care destination.” Part of its website is dedicated to marketing the campus and its top-rated health care facilities, and providing resources for patients and families coming to Aurora for medical care. In fact, Aurora’s health care industry has grown so exponentially over the last decade that Visit Aurora isn’t the only organization in charge of accommodating patients and families’ needs when it comes to recommending places to visit and things to do. Children’s Hospital Colorado and University of Colorado Hospital both have concierges that offer those types of services.
The two years since Visit Aurora was launched have been peppered with monumental moments including an unimaginable tragedy, a few economic development coups and a massive, Western-themed hotel project with an uncertain future.
Wheat’s Visit Aurora team, composed of Briley Peters, who previously worked with Wheat in Waterloo, and Kate Bleakley, a former sales rep for the Red Lion hotel in Aurora, are the city’s evangelists. Like cheerleaders with rehearsed motivational chants, the trio touts the city’s attributes wherever and whenever they can: its sprawling, prestigious Anschutz Medical Campus, its award-winning water, the esteemed Buckley Air Force base, its leisurely golf courses and ambitious theater culture.
Even the July 20 massacre that sent shockwaves across the world and put Aurora on the map didn’t seem to faze potential visitors. There were no plans to cancel events or conventions that Visit Aurora had helped recruit to the city, and no questions were raised about the city’s safety in the wake of the shooting, Wheat said. If anything, the calamity drove more traffic to the visitaurora.org website from people worldwide wondering what kind of city Aurora was. In one year that website garnered 30,000 website views from IP addresses in 100 countries and all 50 states.
Wheat and Bleakley even received calls from potential homeowners interested in relocating because they wanted to live in a city that displayed such an outpouring of compassion and resilience after a deranged gunman terrorized its soul.
“For us, through tragedy comes awareness and I think people from across the world saw our city come together,” he said.
Wheat doesn’t completely ignore Aurora’s mixed reputation, its East Colfax blemishes and cadre of disgruntled taxpayers. Still, he insists that most people don’t have a poor opinion of the city. On a recent airplane trip back to Colorado, Wheat sat next to a man whose expression flickered with familiarity when Wheat told him he worked in Aurora. Wheat thought his seatmate would immediately associate the city with the theater shooting. Instead, he linked Aurora to its darling, homegrown Olympian, Missy Franklin.
“Sometimes,” Wheat said, “Aurora gets a raw deal.” Sometimes, not.
MORE IN THIS SERIES
WISH YOU WERE HERE? Greetings from Aurora
WISH YOU WERE HERE? The Year of Eating Here
WISH YOU WERE HERE? Sports tournaments score big as tourist draws
WISH YOU WERE HERE? Travel Sickness
WISH YOU WERE HERE? In Search of the Incidental Tourist