Study: Legal pot not drawing tourists to Washington state

When recreational marijuana went on sale in Colorado this year, it sparked a sharp increase in tourism. But a new study finds so far, there’s seemingly not much interest in visiting Washington state to purchase pot.

Interest in traveling to Washington state is actually down slightly since legal pot sales started July 8, according to the study by Massachusetts-based travel firm Hopper, which looked at over one billion online travel queries made daily.

While travel search interest to Denver is up 20 percent since January 1, searches for Seattle dropped 2 percent this month, says Hopper data analyst Virginia Nicholson.

“I started running this analysis, I want to say, in early June. And then every two weeks I’ve been refreshing the numbers and we just still haven’t seen the increase at all,” she says.

Hopper adds a number of factors seem to playing into the lack of interest in flying to Washington state to get high, including a shortage of marijuana and limited number of retail outlets.

She says legal pot doesn’t seem to be nearly the novelty in the west that it is in the middle of the country.

“A lot of the states around Washington are already pretty weed-friendly, whereas in Colorado that wasn’t the case for a lot of the states nearby. People couldn’t in the safety of their own state…without getting a huge penalty or even jail time.”

The report says airfare could also be playing a part in making Denver more appealing to pot tourists than Seattle. Over the past month, domestic round-trip prices to Denver are averaging $179 while travel to Seattle is averaging $245.

“There is a pretty significant price difference between getting to the middle of the country and the West Coast.”

Nicholson also speculates the price of pot could be a deterrent for potential tourists, with legal marijuana selling for far more in Washington than Colorado because of taxes and fees.

While it’s hard to say how many people are traveling to Colorado just to buy pot, there’s no doubt visitors are buying plenty of it. A recent report by the Marijuana Policy Group estimated that 90 percent of Colorado’s recreational marijuana sales came from tourists in ski towns and 40 percent come from tourists in metro areas.

Nicholson says she’s surprised there hasn’t been even a slight increase in travel interest to Seattle and Washington state, and will be keeping a close eye in the coming months to see if things change as pot becomes more readily available and prices decline.

“It’ll be interesting to see if by word of mouth, if more people become interested in visiting.”