Officials from Visit Denver and Colorado’s Office of Outdoor Recreation Industry expressed surprise and, of course, disappointment to Emerald X’s decision to move the Outdoor Retailer show back to Salt Lake City starting in 2023.

“We were all pretty surprised,” said Richard Scharf, president and CEO of Visit Denver. “We’ve been working the past two to three months on a proposal, making sure they had the Convention Center the dates they wanted, the hotel packages – everything they needed. We’re definitely surprised and sorry to see them go.”

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Scharf said they submitted the hotel packages to Emerald on Tuesday.

“We put together a competitive and fair offer, and we all thought we were in a pretty good spot,” said Conor Hall, director of Colorado’s Office of Outdoor Recreation Industry.

That package included up to $400,000 in incentives from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. The money was left over from the original $1.7 million package the state put together in 2017 to get the show in 2018 and beyond. The package was supposed to be for 15 shows, but Emerald only got nine shows because of COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns of businesses and travel.

“Visit Denver did all they possibly could, moving shows around to accommodate them, which is especially tough for the summer months. It was Herculean,” Hall said. “Traditionally, OEDIT does not give incentive packages to trade shows. But this was a rare case, because the outdoor industry is so, so important to this state.

“But our mission is also to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, so any offer too much higher might have called that into question.”

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When the show was at its peak in 2019, and January 2020, it would draw more than 26,000 visitors. The show this past January drew only 5,300 attendees and 1,400 retailers. The summer show in 2021 drew 7,600 visitors and 2,200 retailers, according to Emerald.

“The last full show was January 2020,” Scharf said. “And they had to move June’s show to August because of COVID’s Delta variant, so I need to compliment them for moving the date and trying. … COVID hit and there was a couple of years without the show. They’re trying to bring it back, but it just hasn’t taken off yet.”

Scharf said losing the show doesn’t impact Denver’s reputation as a convention-friendly city.

“We’ve got the third busiest airport in the world. We’ve got the most domestic connections with nonstop flights, and our airfares are lower than Salt Lake City’s,” Scharf said. “We have 12,000 hotel rooms within two miles of the Convention Center, a multimillion expansion of the Convention Center. … This city is full of investment and has an incredible future.”

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Hall said the hole left by Outdoor Retailer will be filled with something new and distinctly Colorado.

“While it’s disappointing to lose the show, it also provides an interesting opportunity to create something new in that space,” Hall said. “We have such a robust and strong outdoor retail industry in the state, for businesses, for nonprofits, for higher education – all these different spaces. There have been a lot of calls for an event that’s much more consumer facing, open to the public more, more inclusive and to include discussions on big issues like the environment and diversity in the industry.”