Haines Tourism director Steve Auch is stepping down after three years. He has produced a report trying to assess how the visitor numbers have varied over the last few years. 

“Basically what I was trying to do was give everybody information as far as the number of people we had come through our community last year and to put a little perspective on it, because historically how we have reported some of these numbers, it has changed since COVID how you have to look at how those numbers reflect what actually happened. We were able to see how road traffic seems to have rebounded to what it was prior to the pandemic” 

 Air traffic has rebounded as well, as for the number of cruise ship visitors, the assessment was more difficult.

“Cruise traffic that was tricky to look at . The numbers that we have traditionally used for cruise ships, has always been based on 100% capacity of the ship, and this past year we couldn’t use that, because especially early season we knew that COVID mitigation and CDC requirements had ships sailing below capacity.”

He has used  an average of 70 percent capacity in his estimates, and even then, adjusted for the fact that some of the cruise ships came in the evening after having spent the day in Skagway, and fewer passengers left the boats at that time.

Eleven cruise ships called in Haines due to the ongoing issues with rock slides above one dock in Skagway, the municipality is working now to fix the problem, so this increase in Haines dockings is not expected to carry over into next year.

Looking at the 2023 docking calendar and taking into account all these adjustments in his estimates, Auch expects cruise visitor numbers next year to be similar to the numbers of 2019.

As for independent travelers,

“There are a lot of people that want to travel to Alaska and more open spaces, and so I would expect that independent travelers would be back into that 2019 range. To have it back to potentially those 2019 numbers is certainly a big boost to our community and our economy.”

Once he quits his job as tourism director Auch plans on staying in Haines. He hopes to never leave.