Yosemite Mariposa Tourism Bureau continues to drive critical visitation, despite challenges

California’s tourism industry was battered and bruised by the worldwide Covid 19 pandemic, and Mariposa County was not exempt, nor was the crown jewel of national parks, Yosemite.

The Yosemite Mariposa County Tourism Bureau has been at the forefront of the recovery effort, and through the orchestrated efforts of Executive Director Jonathan Farrington and his talented team, visitation is on the rebound.

Some folks believe Mariposa itself would be just a wide spot in the road with a gas station and a mini-mart if it weren’t for Yosemite Park. Tony McDaniel, Director of Communications for the tourism bureau strongly disagrees. “I really believe Mariposa County would be a really solid tourism destination on its own. Our focus is not necessarily purely on Yosemite, but on the region itself.”

That statement is evident on the main website of the organization, Yosemite.com, where visitors will find 23 categories under the “Things to Do” tab featuring primarily Mariposa County enterprises.

“We receive a crazy amount of traffic as a result of the work we do, both organizational and paid. There are 3.2 to 3.4 million visitors to the website annually and about 20 percent return a second or third time. One of the important statistics we glean from the website is the number of business referrals that move from the website to the lodging industry, which has resulted in over 400,000 individual referrals from the website alone,” explained Farrington. “We get a lot of demographic and geographic information from our website which provides a deep data dive for us to focus our marketing efforts. Everything we do is focused on getting the best bang for our buck.”

The Yosemite.com website received a significant facelift and redesign just last year. “Starting in 2022 we put out a request for proposals, and Noble Studios, who we were working with, came up with the winning format. We sunk hundreds of hours of staff time into the new version, which went live in May of 2023. It’s far more functional and now it breaks the county out into different regions, which helps people gain an understanding of the entire area, not just Yosemite National Park,” McDaniel said.

The tourism bureau’s website has been collecting award after award. “I think at this point we’re up to six awards on this site now. The tourism industry recognizes this as one of the best websites in the entire county, and it’s recognized by Word Press as the best tourism platform they have,” McDaniel added.

“We’ve kicked some digital tail in the tourism website field. We went through a pretty extensive website rebuild. When we started, our site was coming up on being a decade old and it was slower and less reactive. The previous site was designed to be a desktop site, as opposed to a mobile site, and now everyone uses their smartphone,” McDaniel explained.

None of the Mariposa County businesses featured on the tourism website pay for the privilege. There are no fees for the agency’s lodging partners, which is rare since virtually all of the other accommodation sites charge a fee or take a percentage of the room charges.

“We pay an annual fee to the site host, and we don’t pass that along to our partners,” McDaniel mentioned. All of the businesses shown under the “Things to Do” category on the site are listed without charge.

“We spent a lot of time exploring all of that data. Everything you see there is really the brainchild of our staff. There’s no fee and no sponsorship,” McDaniel said. “We sent out requests to the chambers of commerce, Main Street Mariposa and others, asking for recommendations to build that list,” Farrington noted.

“We did have a lot of local insight from our staff since four out of the five members of our staff live here in Mariposa County,” McDaniel added.

The tourism bureau uses all of its considerable internet and social media resources to promote local events. It also provides actual financial funding for county events, typically totaling around $25,000 annually.

“By law, we have to make sure we use it to the benefit of the use payors,” Farrington explained. (Use payors are the lodging providers that collect the Business Improvement District (BID) fees that are included in their accommodation charges which funds the tourism bureau. Those charges are not the county’s Transient Occupancy Tax.)

The tourism bureau offers financial support to qualifying events, and those funds must be used by the organization to market the event. “Funding for all events has to be vetted properly by board members and marketing team members to make sure it meets our parameters,” Farrington stated. “That decision isn’t directed by the county, but we want to make sure we step up to help.” The bureau offers event sponsorship funds from $500 to $3,000 and there is a specific application process.

Like all marketing efforts, the whole process comes down to dollars and cents. Of the slightly over $3 million in budgeted expenses for 2023/2024, the bureau spent just 10 percent on administration and operations. Approximately another 10 percent was directed to public relations, while the bulk of the budgeted amounts were dedicated to sales and marketing, almost 80 percent. Mariposa County also charges a one percent administrative fee to basically write the checks, which totaled close to $30,000.

“We project all of our revenue and spending in advance. So, we’re currently working on our budget for the 2024/25 fiscal year. We project to have a budget of $2.7 million to market the county this coming year, which is down from our current projected budget of $3.1 million. This projection changed due to the return of the Yosemite Reservation System.,” McDaniel noted.

Farrington explained, “We us as much of our funding as we can to pay media to drive overnight stays. Really our focus is on the off-season, or shoulder seasons. Our goal is to keep visitation stable. Our ethos is to keep the line-level tourism people here in Mariposa County working throughout the year to keep them off of government programs and assistance.”

Almost 60 percent of visitation to Mariposa County and Yosemite consists of California residents. Since 2012, tourism spending in the state steadily rose from around $111 billion to $144 billion in 2019. Then came Covid, and revenues plunged to $68 billion in 2020. There has been rapid regrowth as the industry bounced back with $134 billion in 2022.

The tourism bureau states that as much as 50 percent of the employment in Mariposa County is created by the tourism industry.

While dodging the effects of wildland fires, potential government shutdowns, extreme weather events, rockfalls and unforeseen challenges to the industry, the Yosemite Mariposa Tourism Bureau perseveres, and its efforts continue to drive visitation, which is the lion’s share of Mariposa County’s operating revenues.