HOSPITALITY
COLLIN RICHIE
NEWS
ANIMAL INSTINCTS: Gabriel Ligon and his Barn Hill Preserve staff got creative during the pandemic to continue attracting visitors to a park that’s home to some 150 animals.
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After a year the hospitality industry would rather forget, there’s optimism that visitors will begin returning to Capital Region attractions. BY CHELSEA BRASTED WHEN NEWS STORIES across the U.S. in March 2020 began to thread together how the coronavirus was prompting mass cancellations of travel plans, entertainment and life as we knew it, Gabriel Ligon wasn’t even home to deal with the fallout. Back then, the founder of the Barn Hill Preserve had his head buried in another crisis: Caring for koala bears who had been scorched in Australian bushfires. As the world ground to a halt, Ligon raced back home to Baton Rouge, where his business faced a suddenly uncertain future. “I had a real shock to my 118
system,” Ligon recalls. “I saw for a few days how airports were ghost towns, how travel had shut down and the fear in people’s eyes. When I got home, I knew things were severe, so if we wanted to keep the animal park open and animals fed, we had to get creative.” The Barn Hill Preserve, which is in East Feliciana Parish about 35 miles north of Baton Rouge, opened in 2012 and is home to about 150 animals, including hyenas, owls, camels, otters and giraffes. Prior to the pandemic, Barn Hill saw about 25,000 to 30,000 visitors in a year, many of
whom traveled from as far as the Netherlands to swim with Ligon’s otters and learn about the other animals on the property. Within weeks of the initial pandemic shutdown, Ligon’s team created the Car-e Safari, which offered homebound families the chance to drive through the park and see Barn Hill’s animals. Ideas such as that, along with a new marketing focus on attracting local visitors, meant Barn Hill made it through the worst of the pandemic with only a small drop in overall visitors. Most tourism facilities in the Capital Region were not as lucky.
Travel spending in the state declined $5.3 billion year-over-year since January 2020, according to data provided by the Louisiana Office of Tourism. Though Baton Rouge benefited throughout the pandemic from not only its location smack in the middle between major population centers in Texas and Gulf Coast beaches but also as a way station for the year’s many hurricane evacuees, the city still saw about 50,000 room nights disappear because of convention cancellations, according to Visit Baton Rouge President and CEO Paul Arrigo. “We learned how fragile the
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