It’s not uncommon for tourist-destination towns to struggle to find a balance between the benefits of tourism and maintaining their local identity. Like other communities in Southeast, Wrangell is no stranger to the issue.

Residents now have the opportunity to provide feedback to the borough about how they are feeling about the town’s growing tourism industry.

This is the second time Travel Wrangell has teamed up with Oregon State University’s Sustainable Tourism Lab to get a better idea of how people feel about the topic. The survey will be available through the end of November, with a report expected by the end of the year.

“Our goal of this is to help communities find the right balance, and knowing that’s going to be different for every community,” said Todd Montegomery, director of the Tourism Sustainability Lab.

The survey was designed to assess whether residents of a given community believe the costs of tourism outweigh the benefits, or vice versa. According to information gathered in the Wrangell Tourism Sentiment Survey in 2025, there is a link between residents’ feelings about how tourism affects their town and the carrying capacity and longevity of the industry here.

Montgomery’s work is informed by a 15-year career in international tourism, where he helped to price the assets of new destinations. “I saw that a lot of the promises around the destination and the jobs, the revenue, you know, all of that often didn’t materialize.”

Returning to academia, he said he wanted to better understand tourism’s impacts. The purpose of the survey is to include residents in the process and to collect actionable data for the communities they work with.

The 2025 survey report showed 241 responses from Wrangell residents with a relatively even spread across age, income and political identity, however the majority of responses came from women. Over 50% of the respondents had lived in Wrangell for more than 20 years and 84% did not work in the hospitality industry.

In that survey, only 20% of respondents indicated that they felt the costs of tourism outweighed the benefits, while 52% were optimistic about the benefits, and the rest were neutral.

Wrangell saw around 40,000 cruise passengers over the 2025 tourist season, marking the town’s busiest year since 2005. This summer nearly doubled that with around 75,000 cruise ship berths over the 2026 season. This year’s survey could help identify the upper end of Wrangell’s carrying capacity.

Economic Development Director Kate Thomas said they are looking to find the balance that works for residents and allows the borough to cash in on tourism revenue.

“We don’t want to create any illusion that we’re trying to plug this full as much as possible and become a Sitka with unbridled growth,” Thomas said, “where you can’t really do anything outside of tourism throughout the season because it’s just everywhere. We wanted to create a balance.”

The $5,000 cost of the survey work was funded with the cruise ship passenger tax that is collected by the state and shared with communities, according to Thomas. The tax pays Wrangell $5 per guest for vessels with more than 250 passengers traveling through Alaska waters for more than one night. 

The survey will be available on the borough’s website under the community tab until at least the end of November. Montgomery said they may leave it open longer if needed to collect more responses to get data that better represents the community’s demographics.

“Just knowing that the residents’ voices are being heard, and that the residents are helping shape policy, and that their community leaders are listening to that,” Montgomery said, “that trust goes just a long way.”