The Tourism and Prosperity Partnership (TAPP) is a non-profit organization that works with boosting one of the largest drivers of the Gunnison Valley’s economy — tourism.
The organization — originally called the Tourism Association — started out with the promotion of tourism as their sole purpose. As the needs of the Gunnison Valley have grown and changed, so has the organization evolved, and in 2019 took on a new name TAPP, along with an expanded set of goals and areas of focus.
“Tourism is our biggest [economic] driver, so to keep the economy turning, we have to keep that as one of our main priorities,” TAPP Executive Director Andrew Sandstrom said. “But at the same time can we diversify and create pillars in our community that are not just reliant on tourism.”
TAPP’s areas of focus now include four main branches: tourism marketing (both for snow and non-snow seasons), local economic development, recruitment and retention for Western Colorado University and stewardship collaborations with the Sustainable Tourism and Outdoor Recreation Committee (STOR). The arm of TAPP that focuses on economic development works closely with the Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship (ICE) Lab to assist Gunnison Valley businesses to build, finance, or grow their businesses in a large variety of different ways. The ICELab is a co-working space born from the Western business school.
“[With the ICELab] we focus on companies that are exporting goods or services out of the valley. The ICELab helps them bring jobs and/or money [from the business] back into the county by giving them access to business accelerators, business advisors, investor networks to raise money or office space,” Sandstrom said. “If there’s a new [non-exporting business] like a coffee shop that comes to town, TAPP could assist in driving its business by bringing more visitors and also by creating more high-paying jobs locally that support the shop.”
TAPP is also in the process of establishing a new space north of Natural Grocers that can help handle businesses’ shipping, receiving and manufacturing.
Aside from some grant funding, the majority of the budget for TAPP comes from the Local Marketing District, a fund that is accrued from a 4% tax on short-term stays in the valley, including hotels, short-term rentals, campsites or any lodging under 30 days. Local voters approved this tax in 2002 and solidified it in perpetuity in 2007.
Gunnison County commissioners serve as the LMD board, and on an annual basis, TAPP presents a budget request to the board based on some of the priorities that the commissioners have identified. Tourism funds TAPP and, in return, TAPP helps encourage more tourism as well as other factors that support economic growth for the Gunnison Valley.
“One of the things we’ve been discussing internally is that the cost of living has outpaced incomes, which is causing problems with housing for the locals,” Sandstrom said. “TAPP is trying to tackle that income problem by creating more local, high-paying jobs to make it easier to live here and is working to build a year-round economy that’s less reliant on the booms and busts of tourism.”
In 2022 voters of the county approved opening up the usage of the LMD funds further, allowing the LMD to use up to 40% of the fund for work force support. This allowed the county to spend $1 million of revenue raised by tourism on the Sawtooth affordable housing project in 2023. In both 2024 and 2025, $500K went towards the Whetstone affordable housing project near Crested Butte. In 2025, $100,000 funded a child care program with a few different initiatives.
These funds, which were formerly delegated solely for the purpose of tourism marketing, are now a balanced give-and-take between TAPP and economic development projects such as these — between bringing tourism into the valley and using tourist dollars spent in the valley wisely to reinvest back into our own communities.
“It’s a balance for the commissioners,” Sandstrom said. “For the first 12-15 years, the LMD fund hovered around $1 million. Now it’s increased to around $3.8 million. We have to keep tourism robust to keep those revenues coming, but we also have to recognize that there are other acute issues for the community that need addressing.”
TAPP also works closely with both the Rural Transportation Authority (RTA) and the airport.
RTA is funded by a sales tax in the Gunnison Valley that excludes gas and groceries — a parameter which was set to ease the tax’ impact on the local population. This tax serves two main purposes, one being the local bus service, and the other the airline guarantees.The community guarantees the airlines minimum revenue should bookings fall below an agreed upon limit..
“That tax gives us air service as a community and free bus service as a community,” Sandstrom said. “TAPP works very closely with RTA to help fill those flights because we would much rather have those flights full of high paying-visitors coming to the valley to spend money and boost our economy — the goal being to fill flights and fill our lives. When our flights are full, the RTA has more money to put into bus service, which helps the locals.”
Winter tourism forecast
While it’s still a little bit too early to say exactly what the upcoming winter season’s tourism will look like, TAPP does have some data-driven tools that they use to predict trends. For the winter 2025-2026 season, Sandstrom said rates (for lodging) are up slightly from previous years, while occupancy is slightly down.
“We have a number of data sets that we look to, both retroactively and forward-looking,” Sandstrom said. “In July 2025, we had fewer unique people visiting the valley, but those visitors were staying longer and paying more for hotel rooms, so even though there were less visitors, local tax collection was up 4%.”
One of TAPP’s priorities for the season is to capture the destination visitor, rather than the drive-market visitor.
“The vast majority of our visitors are driving here from the front range and we have become extremely reliant on the drive market visitors,” Sandstrom said. “We saw that last winter January was very cold and had very little snow, so many of these visitors didn’t come. Airline visitors aren’t as fickle with chasing the snow and they book [their trips to the valley] further out. We are working to insulate ourselves from the [unpredictability] of the drive market visitors.”
(Gia Wright can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or gia@gunnisontimes.com.)
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