Wrangell’s tourism arm, Travel Wrangell, has again teamed up with Oregon State University’s Sustainable Tourism Lab to collect data about Wrangell’s growing industry. Residents can provide feedback to the borough through the Tourism Sentiment Survey through November.
Todd Montgomery is the director of the Tourism Sustainability Lab.
Our goal of this is to help communities find the right balance, and knowing that’s going to be different for every community.
The survey was designed to assess whether residents of a given community believe the costs of tourism outweigh the benefits, or vice versa. The lab has found a link between residents’ feelings about tourism and the carrying capacity and longevity of the industry in their town.
Montgomery’s work is informed by a 15-year career in international tourism, where he helped to price the assets of new destinations. “I saw that a lot of the promises around the destination and the jobs, the revenue, you know, all of that often didn’t materialize.”
Returning to academia, he said he wanted to better understand tourism’s impacts. The purpose of the survey is to include residents in the process and to collect actionable data for the communities they work with.
The 2025 survey report showed 241 responses from Wrangell residents with a relatively even spread across age, income and political identity, however the majority of responses came from women. Over 50% of the respondents had lived in Wrangell for more than 20 years and 84% did not work in the hospitality industry.
In this survey, only 20% of respondents indicated that they felt that the costs of tourism outweighed the benefits, while 52% were optimistic about the benefits, and the rest were neutral.
Wrangell saw around 40,000 cruise passengers over the 2025 tourist season, marking the town’s busiest year since 2005. This summer nearly doubled that with around 75,000 cruise ship berths over the 2026 season. This year’s survey could help identify the upper end of Wrangell’s carrying capacity.]
Wrangell’s Economic Development Director Kate Thomas says they are working to find the balance that works for both residents and allows the borough to cash in on tourism revenue.
We don’t want to create any illusion that we’re trying to plug this full as much as possible and become a Sitka with unbridled growth where you can’t really do anything outside of tourism throughout the season because it’s just everywhere.
The tourism survey will be available on the borough’s website under the community tab until at least the end of November. That will be followed by a report sharing the results in January.
Montgomery says they may leave the survey open longer to get data that better represents the community’s demographics if needed.
