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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.
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 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
industry is,” Arrigo says, calling the past year a “roller coaster.” “I don’t think any industry felt the negative impact as much as the hospitality industry, restaurants, attractions and hotels.”
Now, between the creativity that saw facilities like Barn Hill get through the worst of the slow months and the steady increase in vaccinations prompting renewed abilities for people to gather, Capitol Region tourism professionals are finally feeling a renewed sense of optimism.
“As the confidence comes back in international travel to the U.S. and in meetings and in travel to New Orleans,” Arrigo says, “that’s going to have a good effect on us—as long as this confidence level continues to rise.”
When the pandemic initially prompted mass closures in 2020, it gave Louisiana State Museum Division Director Rodneyna Hart more time than she’d ever had to focus on programming. With the sudden disappearance of riverboat cruises and other tours dropping off a steady stream of out-of-state visitors practically at the doorstep of the Capitol Park Museum, Hart and her team began to experiment with other ways to connect.
“The desire to be socially close never went away just because we needed to be physically distant,” Hart says. “Everyone turned to art, turned to literature, to movies, to online experiences with museums. … We are foundational in building culture. It is a huge responsibility. It is also really awesome to be able to serve in that way.”
With virtual programming and socially distanced visitation, the Louisiana State Museum facilities were able to connect with a hyperlocal audience in a way they hadn’t before, Hart says, while also finding new audiences in faraway places.
“All parameters were lifted. You didn’t need to be geographically close to care for or have an experience with us,” Hart says. “It moved to being something broadly accessible to everyone, and that was really valuable.”
Still, the return of all seven riverboat cruises with Baton Rouge stops, which combined with bus tours account for most of the groups visiting the Capitol Park Museum, are a welcome boon as Hart hopes to see more visitors walk through the building’s actual doors.
Between March 2020 and March 2021, there were 145 canceled riverboat dockings; now, between April and December 2021, city officials expect about 100 dockings.
“(The pandemic) showed us
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something that we were not aware of: The amount of leisure travel Baton Rouge does receive,” Arrigo says. “People want to pass through or stay in Baton Rouge. That was significant, and with riverboats starting up again … we realize how valuable they were.”
LSU and Southern University account for another highly anticipated return. With abbreviated football schedules and attendance caps in 2020, hotels and attractions across the city saw stark drops in visitor spending.
“Especially when you get to SEC games or you bring in a well-known non-conference opponent, it’s high-occupancy profitability weekends for us,” says Scott Michelet, general manager of the Crowne Plaza Baton Rouge. “The rug was pulled out from underneath us for that. … When you have (LSU playing Alabama) and still there are rooms available in town, that tells you you’re having a rough football season.”
The Crowne Plaza was particularly hard-hit by social distancing mandates and event attendance caps. Through multiple rounds of layoffs, Michelet says, he saw his staff drop from 175 to around a dozen at the hotel’s lowest point.
“It was a very skeleton staff,” he says.
The facility’s 15,000 square feet of ballroom space went from hosting large weddings and conferences to offering socially distanced meeting rooms for work groups of local businesses looking to gather safely.
“It’s devastating to look at daily numbers compared to last year,” says Michelet, who noted his staff numbers in spring 2021 were back up to between 40 and 50 employees. “It was so sad to see what happened, and we still have a long road to go to recover in this industry.”
Michelet hopes the slow increase in consumer confidence creates what he calls a trickle-down effect for his hotel because it’ll take associations and large organizations to start hosting meetings again before the Crowne Plaza’s road to recovery really smooths out.
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“The unknown is still a factor,” Michelet says.
Like Michelet, Dwayne Sanburn, who owns the internationally acclaimed 13th Gate haunted house and escape rooms, also relies on corporate travel for his regular customer base because the escape rooms, Sanburn says, are a great team-building activity.
“We had a 100% drop in corporate groups when the pandemic hit, and now we’re still 75% down,” Sanburn says. Even the haunted house, with expanded hours to accommodate social distancing, had attendance drop about 30%.
Sanburn says he’s encouraged—optimistic, even—thanks to recent headlines and the slowly but surely increasing visitor numbers. He hopes by fall that the 13th Gate is “close to being back to some sort of normal.
“It certainly wasn’t a normal year,” Sanburn says, “but we were just happy to be open.”
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