“A return to more traditional travel patterns.”
That’s what Kelly Wolgamott, interim vice president of Travel Michigan, says about Michigan’s tourism economy based on 2023 travel numbers. The state – and Northern Michigan in particular – proved to be a major draw at the height of COVID-19, as outdoor recreation sites saw unprecedented numbers of visitors. With that pandemic boost in the rearview mirror, The Ticker looks at what the summer of 2024 was like in Leelanau County.
In May 2020, Trevor Tkach, president and CEO of Traverse City Tourism, predicted that tourism in Northern Michigan would flourish once COVID-related lockdowns were lifted.
“Some of the national indicators suggest that when people start traveling again, they will want a lot of space,” Tkach said. “They will want to be in nature. They will not want to go to big metropolises. They will prefer more remote destinations.”
Tkach’s prediction proved accurate, and nowhere was this more evident than at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The park welcomed a record-breaking 1,718,696 visitors in 2020 and broke the record again at the end of 2021 with 1.72 million visitors.
In the years since, Sleeping Bear hasn’t come close to reaching those pandemic highs. The park barely cracked the 1.5 million mark in 2022, according to Superintendent Scott Tucker. Last year, there was a slight increase to 1,583,651 visitors, exactly the same as 2019’s 1,570,001.
Although final numbers aren’t available for this summer, Sleeping Bear Dunes appears to be bucking recent trends. Through the first seven months of 2024, the park recorded 926,506 visitors. That’s less than the numbers through July of 2020 (931,827) and 2021 (996,650), but more than the numbers of 2023 (903,640), 2022 (856,052), or 2019 (850,151). Part of that increase is due to an unusually mild winter and spring, but the summer was busy, too. Between June and July, Sleeping Bear had 754,300 visitors, compared to fewer than 700,000 in the same two-month period in 2022. In fact, this year’s June/July number is comparable to Sleeping Bear’s record year of 2021, when the park had 759,393 visitors in those two months.
Katy Wiesen, co-owner of Crystal River Outfitters Recreation District in Glen Arbor, reports a similarly successful summer. Crystal River Outfitters rents kayaks, canoes, bikes and stand-up paddleboards and has several outdoor shops.
“The summer of 2024 was great,” Wiesen told Leelanau Ticker“Our leisure and business levels have remained relatively consistent since Memorial Day weekend 2020, when we reopened after the pandemic lockdown.”
If there is a risk for Meadows heading into the 2024 season, it is the fact that Crystal River Outfitters will cease kayak and canoe rentals early this year due to the need to replace a bridge and culvert along the company’s usual paddling route on the Crystal River.
“Labor Day weekend will be the last weekend for paddlers to be able to kayak on the Crystal River, as the popular ‘shoot-the-tube’ culvert will be replaced by a cantilever bridge in the fall,” says Wiesen. “This cantilever bridge will make portaging easier for all ages and skill levels and keep the river healthy. Kayak trips will resume as usual starting in May 2025.”
The rest of the recreation district “remains open year-round for biking, shopping, wine drinking and winter rentals,” Wiesen adds.
Leelanau’s newest outdoor recreation center is also reporting a successful season: Mike Sheldon, owner of the River Club Glen Arbor (RCGA), says the mini-golf hotspot “opened a relatively quiet week on June 24th, but then was completely overrun starting July 5th.”
“Many days we had over 2,500 guests,” says Sheldon. To put that into perspective, according to the 2020 census, Glen Arbor Township’s total year-round population is 757.
Although the RCGA is ending its peak season, Sheldon said the venue will remain open through the fall, with live music Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, “tailgate and mini golf” parties during major college and professional football games, and an “expanded fall menu with apple cider, doughnuts, candied apples and pumpkin or apple flavored margaritas.”
Although it looks like a typical, busy summer in Leelanau County, Paul Andrus of Lake Life Efoils says he’s noticed a difference this year compared to past years. Andrus started his Lake Leelanau-based company in 2021 to introduce local customers to the then-brand-new eFoil technology. Using an electric motor and propeller, eFoil boards lift riders above the water, simulating the feeling of flight. Lake Life Efoils offers sales, rentals and lessons related to the equipment.
“We’ve been busy for the last three years, teaching a lot and selling quite a bit,” Andrus says of the business. “This year we’ve really hit the ground running with teaching, but sales have definitely been down. We normally sell an average of 12 to 15 boards a year, which is a lot considering these boards cost between $9,000 and $14,000. This year we’ve only had five sales.”
Andrus suspects that as travel behavior normalizes, spending will also increase.
“I think we had a lot of new visitors – and a lot of new residents – in Leelanau (during the pandemic), and a lot of them bought expensive toys because they came to the county with a lot of money,” he says. “For some reason, that seems to have waned this year.”
Andrus hopes to bridge that gap by embracing Northern Michigan’s growing tradition of “local summers.”
“We’re giving every local a $50 discount on a lesson and a free T-shirt for the entire month of September,” he says.
