Rick Hoeninghausen is retiring after 26 years as director of sales and marketing for the primary concessioner in Yellowstone National Park. (Ruffin Prevost/Yellowstone Gate)
CODY, WYO. — In 1998, Yellowstone National Park hosted just over 3.1 million recreational visitors. Last year, that figure topped 4.5 million, approaching the 2021 record of 4.8 million annual visitors.
At least part of the credit (or blame) for that increase goes to Rick Hoeninghausen.
The longtime director of sales and marketing for Xanterra Travel Collection, Yellowstones’s primary concessioner, has held that job since 1998. He has been in the process of a long, slow goodbye from his position for much of this summer. Hoeninghausen will be in Cody on Aug. 20 to introduce his successor, marking the end of more than a quarter century of working with local industry partners.
A beloved figure in the Wyoming tourism industry, Hoeninghausen had planned to retire a few years back, but gyrations in the stock market and national economy kept him working through mid-summer of this year. But the affable marketer is used to dealing with the unexpected.
Hoeninghausen first arrived in Yellowstone to fill an assistant marketing position in April of 1988, just in time for that summer’s cataclysmic fire season that saw flames spread across one-third of the park, drawing national headlines for weeks. He left for other work for a while after that, but returned 10 years later, and still recalls the 1988 summer fires.
“It was a brutal summer in a lot of ways, and certainly from a marketing perspective. This was before the Internet. We had the one and only fax in the entire company,” Hoeninghausen recalled of 1988, when he would send daily faxes to media and travel partners in an effort to keep visitors coming to the park.
Hoeninghausen hired a videographer to shoot images of areas in Yellowstone that were unaffected by fire, and often drove from Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming to Billings, Montana to deliver footage to TV stations.
“We had one shot that started with a wall of flames, then pulled back to show elk grazing in a green field, then back more to see visitors taking pictures,” he said.
Temporary road closures came and went throughout the summer before managers closed the entire park. Hoeninghausen said the experience made it easier to deal with temporary, park-wide closures after COVID-19 in 2020 and record floods in 2022.
While the National Park Service’s 1988 fire management policy, then dubbed “let it burn,” was a political issue, “COVID was ten times more political in the way people perceived it,” Hoeninghausen said, recounting how Xanterra employees were cursed at and spin on by visitors angry over everything from long lines to limited food and services to policies over masks and social distancing.
“I’ll tell you straight up, it wore me out. It took its toll on me and everyone,” he said.
But through all the challenges, Hoeninghausen’s colleagues say he has proven not only a reliable and skilled professional, but an affable and engaging friend with an irrepressible sense of humor.
Rick Hoeninghausen, outgoing director of sales and marketing for Xanterra Parks & Resorts, points out a few spots where last-minute window cleaning is needed by Michaela Matuskva before a 2014 ribbon-cutting celebrating completion of a 2-year, $28.5 million renovation of Lake Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. (Ruffin Prevost/Yellowstone Gate)
Cooperation over competition
“It’s hard not to like him,” said Claudia Wade, who worked closely with Hoeninghausen for decades before retiring in 2021, after nearly 35 years as director of the Park County Travel Council. “It’s hard not to laugh when he gets you going, yet he’s so serious about what he does. He has a way that is warm and effective, and you feel very fortunate to have been able to work with him on projects.”
Hoeninghausen always took a cooperative, rather than competitive, approach to working with Cody and Park County to attract visitors, Wade said.
“We’re so fortunate that Rick likes Cody and the authenticity of what goes on in Cody,” she said. “He doesn’t know a stranger at all, and if he says he’s going to do something, he does it.”
Michael Keller, general manager in Yellowstone for Xanterra, said Hoeninghausen’s “love of Yellowstone, care for his employees, and passion for visitors and their experiences has helped lead our operation.”
That was the official comment, at least, that Keller gave after offering some good-natured ribbing of his co-worker, with whom he shares a common sensibility for not letting the serious get in the way of the hilarious.
“All kidding aside, Rick really is an exceptional guy,” said Keller, who has worked with Hoeninghausen for over 20 years. “Rick’s partnerships with the National Park Service, gateway communities, the state of Wyoming, our corporate office and many national partners has been exemplary. We will miss his wit, experience, and insight, and wish Rick, Karen, and his family nothing but continued success in all future endeavors.”
Hotelier Ted Blair said it will be “impossible to replace Rick Hoeninghausen. There’s never going to be another Rick.”
“We traveled the world together going to travel shows, and it was unbelievable the amount of business he could do in such a short time, and the friendships he had with people all over the world who wanted to see him and talk to him,” said Blair, CEO of Blair Hotels in Cody. “We would argue and fight, but it was all in fun, because we have loved each other as best friends.”
“He has such a quick wit and great personality, and we had a lot of fun. But when he gets down to business, it’s all business,” said Blair, who in 2002 received the Big Wyo, an award given annually by the Wyoming Hospitality and Travel Coalition to promoters of travel and tourism in the state. Wade received the same honor in 2006, and Hoeninghausen was the 2019 Big Wyo winner.
Rick Hoeninghausen, outgoing director of sales and marketing for Xanterra Parks & Resorts, chats with a group of visiting travel writers during a tour earlier this summer of Mammoth Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. (Ruffin Prevost/Yellowstone Gate)
Job aligns with values
Hoeninghausen plans to move soon to the northern Georgia area with his wife, Karen, whom he met in Yellowstone in 1980, when both had summer jobs there. He’s looking for a similar area, somewhere that is a small town, close to the outdoors, and good for river rafting.
Visitors will always come to Yellowstone, Hoeninghausen said, which was never the point of his job, which he described as “just about the best job imaginable.”
Hoeninghausen recalled a childhood that included watching Westerns on TV, along with nature shows hosted by Marlin Perkins and Jacques Cousteau, as well as sharing a love of cowboys with his father, who grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
After dreaming of working as a cowboy or park ranger, he ended up working outdoors-related jobs in Idaho, Florida and North Carolina before his long stint in Yellowstone, saying his career has worked out because “it has always aligned with where my values and loves are.”
For the last quarter century, that love has been for Yellowstone, and Hoeninghausen enjoys nothing more than hearing from park visitors about how their trip has been “life-changing.”
“That phrase, ‘life-changing,’ isn’t something you hear every day. But you hear it often enough,” he said.
But Hoeninghausen also hears from plenty of people who don’t see the point of marketing Yellowstone as a destination, as annual visitation levels continue to climb, and summer crowds turn the park’s most popular spots into snarls of gridlocked vehicles.
“That’s probably the question I get asked most often: ‘Why do you market Yellowstone? How hard can that be?’” Hoeninghausen said.
He conceded that it’s easy to sell a room, tour or meal in the park during the summer, with accommodations routinely selling out, sometimes a year in advance.
“But people think all I want to do is jam people in here, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. And that’s not what Xanterra is looking to do,” he said.
Instead, the company, which is the country’s largest park concessioner, targets travelers who “are all about parks, and wont’ get bent out of shape if they don’t have TV or Internet,” Hoeninghausen said.
He has worked to attract visitors who will spend several days in Yellowstone, engaging in multiple activities while there. His other marketing efforts are aimed at building traffic in spring, fall and winter, “which is not always an easy sell,” Hoeninghausen said.
“Our ultimate goal is that everyone who stays here walks away as some sort of steward,” he said. “I know that sounds lofty, and people think I’m making it up. But I’ve been here this long because I love it.”
