Battered by pandemic, Ashland reimagines its tourism economy

If you’ve visited Ashland lately, you may have been struck by how normal it all feels. Tourists stroll down Main Street, most of them maskless. Diners throng the outdoor seating along Calle Guanajuato, the pedestrian way along Ashland Creek. Lithia Park is lush from recent rains. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is in full swing. You can almost forget we’re just emerging from more than two years of a pandemic and that we’re still in the throes of a record drought.

Make no mistake: the COVID-19 pandemic hit Ashland hard. It came on the heels of two smoky summers, during which several performances of the festival, Ashland’s anchor attraction, were canceled. OSF went dark for all of 2020 and most of 2021.

“Pre-pandemic, we had people who had been coming to Ashland for 20-plus years,” says Drew Gibbs, owner of the Winchester Inn and two Ashland restaurants, Alchemy and Chateaubriand 36. “They were people who wanted to book the same weekend every year. They didn’t care what was playing at OSF; they’d be there.”

While festival patrons, many of them older, wealthy retirees, stayed away, others came, once the first wave of the pandemic receded. When Gibbs talked to his customers, he learned they were there to go mountain biking or on wine tours, or were simply passing through on their way to somewhere else.