Salt Lake City has unveiled a marketing campaign that presents it as the premier ski town in the Rocky Mountain region, but Park City officials state it will have little effect on the local ski scene.
The campaign, billing the Salt Lake City area as “Ski City USA” comes with the tagline, “Once you’ve stayed in Ski City, you’ll never stay in a ski town.”
However, Scott Beck, president of Visit Salt Lake, a corporation that promotes tourism to Salt Lake County and helped spearhead the “Ski City USA” campaign, said the marketing is not a shot at Park City.
“I think it’s the tagline that (people are) reading into that we’re going after somebody. But I think what we’re really trying to say is the attributes that make Salt Lake City unique are unrivaled. And that’s really the basis of it.
Using the words ‘Ski City’ is just vernacular that most people know and recognize. So while it may seem like it’s against somebody, we recognize that there are phenomenal ski towns, Park City being one of them.”
The Associated Press reported that at last week’s unveiling of the campaign, Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams specifically mentioned Park City as someplace that can’t match what Salt Lake offers. The Salt Lake Tribune quoted him as saying that Salt Lake is “a great alternative to the traditional ski or snowboard experience where visitors are restricted by the limited offerings of a small resort town.”
