One of the founders of Adventures on the Gorge, Dave Arnold, knows that winter in the whitewater rafting industry is for "eddying out" - resting up, looking ahead and scouting to see where the wild outdoors adventure industry will take them next.
These days, the industry is seeing fewer tourists on the river, but finding success attracting tourists to outdoor adventures on land, including zip-lining and other activities.
Recently released by the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, which tracks the number of people rafting in the state each month, the 2016 commercial rafting numbers show that 100,312 people rafted the New and Gauley rivers last year, down 4,687 people from 2015. The annual rafting report highlights outfitters on the Cheat, Gauley, New, Shenandoah and Tygart rivers in West Virginia. The epicenter for guided tours is the New River Gorge area.
"The statewide industry numbers were down just slightly from the year before," said Arnold, Adventures on the Gorge spokesman. "We attribute this to the severe flooding, which occurred in June."
That said, Arnold - whose company, Adventures on the Gorge, assisted 43,481 of those people with rafting experiences, making up 43 percent of the market - said that the numbers of rafters have decreased since the heyday back in mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, when as many as 225,000 visitors would come to whitewater raft in West Virginia.
"I used to tell people as the numbers were going down, look at that stadium at Marshall when it is full, and that is how many people are gone. Then it was look at that full stadium at West Virginia, and that is how many people are gone. And now it is look at the full stadiums at Ohio State and Michigan, and that is a huge number of people who are gone from the marketplace."
At its height, there were 30 whitewater outfitters in West Virginia. Now there are eight with most of them operating at large, resort-style base camps at either ACE Adventures or Adventures on the Gorge, with only a handful of other mom and pop outfitters such as Cantrell's also holding on.
Outdoor activities are an important part of West Virginia's overall tourism industry, responsible for about 10 percent of the state's annual overnight stays, according to the Longwoods Travel USA annual study. The largest contributor to overnight stays are people visiting family and friends, about 47 percent, but outdoors, casinos, special events and the state's cities are important drivers in the portion of tourism visits that officials say can be influenced by marketing.
Strategic changes
Arnold said when the numbers for the whitewater industry began to decline, the owners started looking more to the model of the ski industry, which is the state's number one outdoor adventure tourism draw bringing in more than 800,000 ski visits a year to the state's five downhill ski resorts.
"We adopted the resort theme, and we started building more lodging and restaurants," Arnold said. "So now even though the industry is taking less people down the river, we are employing more people and making more money."
Adventures on the Gorge offers a base camp that features an outdoor sports buffet of nearly two dozen adventures that includes bus trips down into the Gorge for whitewater rafting, but that also includes popular zip-line canopy tours such as their TreeTops (which has been named a Top 10 canopy tour in the U.S.), their aerial playground TimberTrek for younger adventurers, as well as a trips to nearby Summersville Lake for kayaking, standup paddleboarding and more.
Add to that fact that the two large resorts, AOTG and ACE, both have a bevy of lodging including deluxe resort-style cabins, as well as AOTG's destination restaurant, Smokey's On the Gorge, which has been featured on Food Network's Best of Mountain Lodges, and you see how tourists are now spending more per visit than back in the 1990s, when raft companies were lucky to have bathrooms and a rustic bar near their primitive campgrounds.
"I can tell you that our customers spend about $280 per person per trip, and when you are looking at the economics of it, this one always surprises me, that they say the number one expense of tourists here is transportation costs," Arnold said. "I think the number $280 probably only covers half what the real expense is."
Rafting decline factors
While last year's June flood hit the rafting industry in the heart of its New River season causing the numbers to drop, Arnold said the customer decline since the peak of the industry probably directly relate to the state's expenditures on marketing the industry, as well as a decline in the number of millennials interested in whitewater rafting.
"It's a bunch of things, and the number one thing is probably the amount of dollars spent on marketing West Virginia," Arnold said. "When I was the chairman of the tourism board, we had $30 million from gaming, and it was huge. But (former governor) Bob Wise felt like it was too much money - and maybe it was - and took the funds down a lot."
Arnold also sees generational changes.
"The other thing is that a lot of millennials are risk adverse, while the boomers were risk takers. I scratch my head at that, but they are more calculated in what they do," he said. "But I think overall it is having less marketing dollars and the changing demographics that have led to less numbers rafting."
With year-round adventures including winter-time canopy tours at AOTG and skiing nearby, Arnold said one good thing in winter is that they get by with nearly all of their cabins rented every weekend. That said in winter the massive campus is pretty quiet with a summer team of 600 seasonal employees trimmed to 50 in winter.
"Our cabins are usually all rented on weekends with mostly couples romantic getaways and a much higher portion of West Virginia residents coming to the Gorge," Arnold said. "In the summer, we only have about 28 percent of our customers from West Virginia, whereas in the winter it's 92 percent so three times that, and all of a sudden we have more West Virginians here who want to have a mountain getaway, and maybe go skiing or go on the canopy tours, which when we get snow is like zip-lining through magicland."
For more about whitewater rafting in West Virginia:
Go online at https://gotowv.com/adventure-play/whitewater-lake/whitewater-rafting/ to link to all the whitewater rafting resorts in West Virginia.
