As Boulder prepares to host the Sundance Film Festival for the first time, Longmont is figuring out how to reap the benefits from one of film’s most prestigious events.
In tomorrow’s Longmont City Council study session, city staff will provide a presentation on festival planning updates. The festival is planned for January 21-31, expected to host over 72,000 people and provide roughly $132 million of economic impact for the region. To maximize Sundance’s impact, Longmont’s tourism, transportation, and planning teams are all scrambling to prepare.
Lodging:
Longmont has 1,006 hotel rooms, including Hotel Longmont’s 84 rooms. Despite being roughly 15 miles from the festival’s epicenter, the city believes its lodging options could overflow. But since nobody knows which movies will be screened and when they’ll be played, the heaviest influx of reservations won’t occur until about a month before the festival. To prepare for the demand, Longmont may open the door for more people to rent out their homes by mirroring Boulder’s Festival Lodging Rental License. This…
Allows people to rent out homes for less than a month.
Has fewer requirements than a Short-Term Rental License, can be applied for year-round, and can be approved in as little as two weeks.
Can be used to rent out spare bedrooms as well as by renters, with landlord approval.
Transportation:
The City of Longmont and RTD are teaming up to offer expanded service during the festival:
BOLT, the bus service offering transportation between Boulder and Longmont, will be extended about an hour before the first movie and an hour after the last one.
The newly-approved Skyride bus service between Denver International Airport and Longmont is expected to play a major role. It kicks off service September 27.
Longmont’s newly-created regional e-bike share program will be available although paths to Boulder are unclear — the city says that due to construction at CO-119 and Hover Street, direct access to the new Diagonal Bikeway will be unavailable but some portions should be accessible.
Marketing:
Visit Longmont hopes to use Sundance Film Festival as a launch pad for increased tourism in the city throughout the year, not just from out-of-state visitors, but for Coloradoans, too. The agency hopes more Front Range residents will see Longmont as a place to “meet in the middle.”
Efforts to attract Sundance attendees to Longmont include geo-targeting state and regional markets and using back-end data to remarket to people who have visited sites promoting Sundance.
Enhanced digital, social media, Google ad campaigns
Visit Longmont pledged $50,000 per year, for 10 years, to enhance awareness of Sundance.
Big picture:
As part of Visit Longmont’s marketing program, a study is being conducted to better understand how visitors perceive the city. Top factors driving visitation will be later leveraged for future programming.