Tourism Mostly Recovered in Wisconsin, But Not Evenly

Sunday, November 13th, 2022 -- 10:00 AM

(By Joe Schulz, Wisconsin Public Radio) Wisconsin tourism has mostly recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the recovery hasn't been even across the state.

According to Joe Schulz with Wisconsin Public Radio, Data from the Wisconsin Department of Tourism shows that the industry generated nearly $21 billion in economic impact last year, an increase of 21 percent from 2020.

That’s still below the record-setting $22.2 billion economic impact in 2019. A recent Wisconsin Policy Forum study highlighted the contrast in recovery between communities.

The report showed that the state’s top-75 municipalities generated less room tax than in 2019. When excluding Madison and Milwaukee, however, those same municipalities exceeded 2019 room tax collections.

The difference illustrates that communities reliant on business travel recovered more slowly than those that rely on recreation, according to Wisconsin Policy Forum Research Director Jason Stein and researcher Tyler Byrnes.

"Areas that rely more heavily on tourism bounced back in 2021, pretty strongly, and you even had some communities that were ahead of where they had been in 2019," Stein said.

"But for places that are more dependent on business travel, like Madison (and) Milwaukee, they did not see that full recovery in 2021." Since the 1990s, room tax has been a growing source of revenue for Wisconsin’s local governments, researchers said.

Under state law, local governments are required to allocate 70 percent of that revenue toward tourism promotion, often through local chambers of commerce or convention and visitor bureaus.

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