Just call Cheyenne the West's new "Convention Capitol." Jim Walter won’t mind if you do.
That’s because Visit Cheyenne’s new president and CEO is fresh off a big tourism win for the state’s capitol city, lassoing Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Cigar Festival and bringing it back home to Wyoming — for good, festival organizers say.
“They used to be here years ago,” Walter told Cowboy State Daily. “They were at the Hitching Post 20 years ago at least, so this is actually a return to their roots, and we’re so happy they chose to come here. It was really a team effort between the folks over at the city getting that information to us, and then our office working with Little America to put our best foot forward and really selling these folks on the fact we can pull this off here.”
Pulling it off will be a feat — and something of another Colorado coup for the Cowboy State, which is fresh off capturing Colorado’s Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association headquarters for Cheyenne and its Museum of the American Cowboy, which will be locating in a new business district called the Hitching Post, between Little America and Horse Palace Swan Ranch.
The cigar festival regularly hosts 2,500 fanatics from across the nation and around the world. It will take up at least nine hotels and require the city’s trolley service to help move folks around. The event will feature more than 60 premium brands, plus special-edition cigars blended just for this event, as well as 100-plus booths with other tobacco-related products.
There will also be a bit of rodeo fun — mechanical bull riding, mechanical calf-roping, Western hat-shaping, and other Western lifestyle booths. Not to mention craft beer and spirit tastings and live music.
Colorado Rules Became Too Restrictive
The Cigar Festival is considered a large convention and had been a marquee Colorado institution for the past 16 years. Now organizers are joining other groups in saying Colorado no longer fits them.
“We began in Boulder at a place called the Harvest House, which is actually now gone,” Tom Bliss, Rocky Mountain Cigar Festival director, told Cowboy State Daily. “So it moved to the Omni and I think we were there for about 10 years. We had a great run there, but really, with Colorado, a lot of the rules and regulations regarding tobacco, regarding tobacco and alcohol together, licensing — they kept tightening the rules on us and kind of changing everything.”
It became increasingly difficult, Bliss said, to comply with the rules and still keep the event fun.
Event organizers went so far as to work with Colorado on creating a cigar festival license, Bliss added, which they thought would solve these issues. Instead it just seemed to lead to more scrutiny and more nitpicking.
That prompted the festival to start looking for a new venue, starting with Cheyenne, which Bliss experienced as instantly friendly and interested. The search was over almost as soon as it began.
Many of the festival’s organizers and manufacturing partners were already familiar with and loved what Cheyenne had to offer, Bliss said.
“A lot of folks have been there before and they love it,” he said. “There’s a lot of fishermen and folks who enjoy that kind of stuff who have gone there for vacations. And then there were other folks who were like, ‘I’ve never been to Wyoming, I’m excited to come and see what’s going on up there'.”
PRCA Packing Its Bags For Wyoming, Too
The Cigar Festival’s move follows another big move away from Colorado. The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association — long headquartered in Colorado Springs — recently voted to pull up stakes and bring its headquarters and the ProRodeo Hall of Fame & Museum of the American Cowboy to Cheyenne by 2029.
While the PRCA was careful to frame its move to Wyoming positively and avoid criticizing its home state, leaders talked about brand and cultural alignment and described Wyoming as a more natural home with more room to grow.
Wyoming lawmakers put $15 million in state tourism funding on the table, matching a $15 million commitment from Cheyenne LEADs, to help land what advocates see as a once-in-a-generation chance to plant rodeo’s governing body in the state that already calls itself the Cowboy State.
The PRCA campus will anchor a 400-plus-acre “Hitching Post” district on prime interstate frontage between Little America, where the Cigar Festival is to be headquartered in July after Cheyenne Frontier Days, and the Horse Palace Swan Ranch.
It’s seen by many in the state’s tourism sector as game-changing for the industry, and a chance to create a year-round Western tourism destination. The Hitching Post District is being imagined as a field for Western dreams, one that could include hotels, a possible convention center, an equestrian complex, a Rodeo 101 school, a bronze sculpture garden of rodeo legends, Western clothing, restaurants, and more.
Revving Cheyenne’s Convention Engine
Visit Cheyenne has long worked to grow the number of conventions it hosts, but it has been seeing particular success of late — which Walter attributes to what he calls the “Yellowstone” effect.
That refers to the boost Western culture has gotten in the wake of the popular Taylor Sheridan television series “Yellowstone.”
“Cowboy boots are popular, and cowboy hats are popular,” Walter said. “The people who watch ‘Yellowstone’ want to … come experience a state capitol out in the West — and we offer the real deal here for sure.”
Cheyenne’s meeting and convention bookings this year are up 11% year over year, Walter said, with 60 conferences of varying sizes ranging from sporting events and dog shows to business meetings.
That worked out to 18,400 room nights, bringing an overall economic impact of $8.8 million to the city.
“That’s new income to the city,” Walter said. “That’s people coming here from across the country, leaving their dollars behind here, and that doesn’t even count the meetings and conventions that Little America and Red Lion go out and book on their own.”
The numbers appear set to continue growing, Walter added.
“So far, this year, we sent out 75 leads to our hotels, so 75 meeting planners have engaged us to see if we’d be a fit for their conference,” he said. “So we’re happy with where we’re at. We’ve got goals for next year that we’d like to see another 10% increase in our bookings and another 10% increase in that economic impact.”
Meetings By Day, Western Adventure By Night
Walter has a hit list of about 50 meetings and conventions he’d particularly like to bring to Cheyenne.
Most of them run in the 150- to 350-attendee range, which he says is a good fit for Cheyenne’s hotels.
“Our secret weapon is all things West,” he said. “We present — and we are — an authentic Western destination.”
Walter sells conventions on the idea that it’s meetings by day, and Western adventures by night, with an itinerary that can include the Terry Bison Ranch, where guests can hand-feed a bison from a train, and off-site receptions at places such as the Wyoming Hereford Ranch, among other options.
Walkable downtown streets with locally owned restaurants, art galleries, and Western clothing don’t hurt the “wow” factor when he’s hosting people on-site visits.
“When you’re feeding a bison yourself on that train and experiencing it, you’re like, ‘OK, now I see where we’re going and why this makes sense',” Walter said. “It’s overall the fact that we offer this really cool Western destination that really appeals to people.”
The size of the cigar festival, at 2,500 people, made hosting the event in Cheyenne an exercise in creativity, figuring out how to serve such a large event’s needs.
But Walter said he believes it will be worth it on several levels. Not only will it bring more lodging taxes to town, but there will be excise taxes on the sale of every cigar.
“That’s going to be a big shot in the arm to both Laramie County and the state of Wyoming,” Walter said. “And that’s the golden ticket for us when it comes to meetings and conventions.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
