Doug Price, who has led Visit Colorado Springs for 16 years, announced Thursday that he will retire at the end of this year.

His announcement came during the annual Visit COS luncheon, a gathering of tourism leaders and organizations in the city and a forum for Visit COS and other agencies to celebrate their wins.  

Price said he is most proud of watching his staff grow over the past 16 years. Visit COS has cultivated a culture that encourages people to stay and help sell the “special place that we live in,” he said.

One thing made his retirement somewhat easy, he said.

“It’s the end of a five-year contract, so there is that,” he said, smiling. “My wife and I, this is our 43rd year of being married, and we’ve just talked about that this is the time to be able to write the next chapter for our lives.”

“I wanted to be proactive about it and not have somebody come up and tap me on the shoulder (saying it’s time to retire),” he added. Price also said he does not plan to depart Colorado Springs.

Price said his time at Visit COS has been positive, but he does wish he could have done one thing sooner: Ask voters to increase the city’s Lodgers and Auto Rental Tax, a 2% tax on hotel and motel stays and a 1% tax on vehicle rentals.

In 2025, Colorado Springs collected $10.06 million from LART, documents from the city show, down from the $10.15 million it collected in 2024. In July, Price told the City Council that LART could be closer to 4% and the city would remain competitive with other markets.

The lodger’s tax in Denver is 10.75% for hotels with 49 rooms or fewer and 11.75% for hotels with more than 50 rooms, according to Denver’s tax booklet.

“We really want to unlock untapped visitor spending,” Price said at the luncheon on Thursday. “Once a LART ballot initiative gets on the ballot, we want to make sure there is enough support to pass it.”

The city has not increased its LART since 1980 and has some of the lowest lodger’s and auto rental taxes in the nation.

The city saw 25.5 million visitors in 2024, accounting for $3.1 billion in spending, according to the Longwoods International Travel USA Visitor Profile report and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs Economic Forum.

But more than half, 13 million, did not spend the night, Price said. This is a metric Visit COS has been trying, and thus far succeeding in, improving. In 2024, people stayed an average of 2.7 nights, up from 2023’s average of 2.2 nights, according to Longwoods data.

“That’s huge, half a day, and of course we’d like to see that go even higher,” he said.