By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
Tallies of tourists visiting the Woodstock region dropped in the aftermath of July’s widespread flooding, then spiked to reportedly unprecedented numbers from Sept. 15 through the end of October as the annual parade of fall leaf-peepers made their yearly junkets to the scenic Upper Valley.
“It started out as a tough spring and summer because of all the wet weather and flooding,” Woodstock Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Beth Finlayson said on Tuesday. “But the end of September and October have just been incredibly robust and busy,” she continued. “We’ve seen numbers at the Woodstock Welcome Center like we’ve never seen before — and I’ve been here a long time.” The Chamber leader said the organization has been tracking tourism statistics since 2007 and added that “this is the busiest season we’ve ever had. The weekends of Oct. 7 and Oct. 14 were just over the top, with more than 2,000 people visiting the Welcome Center. Even last week, we were seeing 300 to 400 people a day, which is unusual.”
Continuing with her observations, Finlayson said there were still charter buses visiting Woodstock in sizable numbers well into the final week of October. “The other thing I can say is that there are younger people visiting the area and many people who drive here,” she noted. “It wasn’t the bus groups that were really driving the business. It was individuals, couples, and families, that kind of thing.”
Asked if the dining and hospitality infrastructure in Woodstock is adequately equipped to handle the fall tourism influx, Finlayson said, “Mondays are something we still need to work on as a community as far as dining is concerned. I know of at least one tour bus company that contacted us so that their bus drivers and tour coordinators knew to have them stop at the White Cottage or make sure that they came on a day other than Monday.” Non-profit groups and other food purveyors proffering their wares on The Green on Sundays and Mondays throughout the peak foliage period had robust sales, the Chamber leader added.
Billings Farm & Museum Executive Vice President for Operations and Engagement Michelle Adams reported similar observations to those shared by Finlayson regarding the recently concluded peak tourism time in the region. “The good news is that we are ending this season at the end of October with a slightly lower visitation number – about five percent less than last year — but with a higher revenue number. That’s based on the fact that we have new programs that are generating revenue and we also have our Gift Shop, Scoop Shop, and our new food truck that is contributing to that.” The increased revenue at Billings Farm & Museum this year was four percent over the 2022 peak season tally, Adams offered.
“Revenues are very important because as a non-profit we want to be sustainable,” Adams continued. “But most importantly, we do have visitation. We do everything we can to have people come and visit Billings Farm & Museum, whether they are paying or not. It could be the free programs that we do or the school groups that we draw. There’s a lot of ways to come to Billings. It could be with a library pass or by using some special programs where we don’t charge people full price for admission.”
Speaking about the past several weeks, Adams said Billings “definitely pulled through by having a really strong foliage season. One thing that really hurt us was the wet spring and, of course, the flooding. People really see us as more of an outdoor space even though we have some really great indoor exhibits.” Adams added that “yesterday [Sunday, Oct. 29] was a rainy day, and even though we had the family Halloween celebration, we had 530 or so visitors, when based on history we were expecting 700 to 1,000, maybe even 1,500. In general, we are not a place to go in the rain — people don’t look to us for that.” While July attendance at the farm and museum was down by about five percent over last year, September and October attendance jumped by roughly four percent, despite the relatively lackluster colors on fall display in Vermont this year due to weather variations earlier in the year, Adams offered.
Regional efforts to dissuade one select group of tourists — camera-toting, fashionable, Instagram “influencers” — from descending upon madly popular, private properties with scenic overlooks such as those on Cloudland Road in Pomfret and surrounding the Jenne Farm in Reading, were largely successful, with orchestrated, well-signed, and policed road closures carrying the day for beleaguered farm and homeowners at the two iconic locations for snapping fall photographs. Commenting on the Woodstock Police Department’s role in enforcing the Cloudland Road closure on the small section of the narrow country road that extends southward from Pomfret into Woodstock, Village and Town Police Chief Joe Swanson said Tuesday that the effort was “completely seamless. We had no calls or complaints to respond to, which was what I was fearing going into it from a police perspective. There were no issues or hiccups.”
Residents of Cloudland Road, as well as public officials in Pomfret and Reading, have indicated that the road closure experiments may be continued for at least another year, given that the closings, along with the widespread posting of word about them on national and international social media platforms, clearly had the desired effect.