Understanding Tourism Funding in Grand County: What the Numbers Actually Mean

January 2026

As we head into the new year, 2026 brings questions none of us can fully answer as external market forces outside our control help shape our regional economic picture. What will a broader national and international economy mean for Moab’s visitor-dependent economy? How will proposed fee increases for International visitors at national parks impact Utah’s Mighty 5? What happens to Moab Regional, EMS services, sheriff’s office staffing, and small businesses if visitation patterns shift?

What we can control is how we invest the dollars our community collects, who we partner with to do that work, the kinds of visitors we try to attract, and the consistency we maintain with that effort. That’s an important conversation, and to make it effective, we first need to understand how the system works. Recent media coverage has raised some questions that deserve clear answers.

Where Does the Money Come From?

Like other destination communities, Grand County funds tourism marketing and promotion with a Transient Room Tax (TRT), a tax visitors pay when they book lodging. As an almost entirely visitation-dependent economy, most residents are familiar with TRT. Utah state law (HB456, subsection 3a) requires that the promotional portion of these funds be used only “for the purpose of establishing and promoting: tourism; recreation; film productions; or conventions.”

This isn’t a choice our county makes. It’s state law. These dollars cannot be redirected to roads, housing, or other community needs, regardless of how large the number may seem and how any of us might feel about it.

The 2025 amended budget for the Moab Office of Tourism required for promotion totaled approximately $5.9 million. The 2026 promotion budget is approximately $4.6 million, which includes the film commission.

What About That “$3.6 Million” Figure I’ve Read About?

It was recently reported that the Moab Office of Tourism hired “three media agencies for nearly $3.6 million.” Unsurprisingly, that number raised a few eyebrows. We’d like to share some actual numbers, what they mean, and why it’s important to look at the details.

Agency service fees for both 2025 and 2026 combined total approximately $1.4 million:

2025 Agency Fees ($443,000):

• Madden Media: $328,000

• Campstories: $55,000

• Camp4/Tourist: $60,000

2026 Agency Fees ($1,046,000):

• Madden Media: $505,000

• Campstories: $106,000

• Camp4/Tourist: $435,000

The higher 2026 figures reflect full-year contracts (these agencies were hired partway through 2025) and expanded scope based on positive 2025 results. They don’t reflect a doubling of spend.

So, where did the $3.6 million number reported come from? It appears to combine agency fees with the entire paid advertising budget, approximately $2.8 million in 2025 and $2.1 million in 2026. But paid media isn’t an “agency fee.” That’s the cost of actually placing advertisements, including buying airtime, content, digital placements, and print space. The agencies manage those buys on our behalf, but the money goes to media outlets, not the agencies themselves.

It’s the difference between what you pay your real estate agent versus the price of the house.

What About Camp4’s “Nearly $1 Million” Contract?

The Camp4 Collective branding project has been reported as costing “almost $1 million.” The actual service fees for Camp4, over two fiscal years and three phases, are approximately $495,000. The project includes $250,000 in hard costs, making the total project cost $745,000. It’s just not accurate to round the project cost up by a quarter of a million dollars, more than one-third of the total cost. 

It is also important to clarify what Camp4’s service fee includes. Returning to the real estate agent and house metaphor, Camp4’s service fee for this project covers renovations and remodeling the house. Camp4 is serving as the architect, designer, contractor, and–most importantly–the builder.

In addition to setting a strategic direction, Camp4 is updating more than 25 years of branding and marketing materials still in use by the Moab Office of Tourism. That is frankly too long for these materials to be effective. The aim of the project is to create current and effective marketing strategies and materials that will help our office and community achieve its goals. Camp4’sservice fee includes:

• Producing and photographing two advertising campaigns

• Designing and producing a new travel guide

• Refreshing and improving DiscoverMoab.com and high-traffic pages

• Implementing the brand across social media channels

• Developing a local business and community toolkit and messaging guide

• Designing and producing new kiosks on Main St, possible highway and airport signage, local billboards, and trailhead and other physical signage

• Organizing the office’s asset library

• Developing target visitor archetypes, competitive landscape analysis, brand positioning, key messages, logos, taglines, and other strategic and practical direction

Why All The Agencies?

This is where the conversation gets more interesting than budget line items.

Madden Media has been named the office’s new agency of record, managing advertising placement, content development, and media buying. Having an agency of record isn’t new to the Moab Office of Tourism–it has retained an agency of record for more than ten years. 

In 2025, the office chose a different agency. They didn’t add another one. The Madden team supporting the office includes more than twenty-five marketing professionals across media buying, creative, data, and account management. 

The Campstories agency is focused on public relations and earned media–engaging journalists to write editorial stories about Moab in newspapers, magazines, broadcast and other media..The Campstories team includes four core team members.

Camp4 Collective is conducting a branding project centered on understanding how both residents and visitors experience Moab, not to tell us what our identity should be, but to develop messaging that authentically represents who we already are. We’ll leverage this approach to attract visitors who respect our community, increase our potential to highlight our arts and culture, and build year-round appeal, not just peak-season adventure tourism. We’re not simply paying agencies for their opinions. We’re hiring them to do the work that accomplishes these objectives. The Camp4 team working on this project includes more than twenty branding, strategy, creative, design and production professionals. 

The Question We Should Be Asking

The discussion often frames tourism spending as “how do we spend money to bring in more tourists?” That’s not quite the right question.

An almost entirely tourism-dependent economy like Moab’s faces the strategic challenge of answering, “How do we maintain the visitation levels that keep our hospitals staffed, our EMS services funded, and our year-round businesses viable and continuing to provide the services and amenities we want while addressing the pressures residents feel during peak seasons?”

Some of the goals of strategic tourism marketing include:

• Shifting visitation toward off-peak times when the community has capacity

• Attracting visitors who value our cultural identity and public lands and behave accordingly

• Increasing visitor spending without necessarily increasing visitor numbers

• Telling the story of Moab that includes residents as central characters, not just a backdrop

Finding Common Ground

Most Moab-area residents seem to agree on a few key points. We want visitors who respect our community and the public lands that make us unique. We want the economic benefits of tourism to be felt by workers, not just extracted by investors (think local dive bars purchased and converted to speakeasies by private equity investors). We want off-peak seasons to be more sustainable for local businesses, affecting what they pay and how they employ essential service workers. We don’t want peak-season crowds to overwhelm our infrastructure and ability to make a left turn out of City Market.

The question isn’t whether to market Moab. State law requires that all the restricted dollars be spent on promotion. The questions are: What story do we tell? To whom? And how do we invite the kind of visitors who will love this place in the ways locals do?

Those are questions this series will continue to explore. We welcome your thoughts, your questions, and your ideas.

For detailed budget information, visit the Grand County Office of Tourism Overview page at grandcountyutah.net/214/Office-of-Tourism-Overview. The full 2026 proposed budget is available through Grand County’s budget documents.

To meet the Moab Office of Tourism’s agency partners and hear what they’re working on, watch MOT’s Agency Partner Presentations on Grand County’s YouTube channel, here: 11.10.25 Moab Office of Tourism - Agency Partner Presentations

Have questions about tourism funding? Ideas for future coverage? Contact  econdev@grandcountyutah.gov.