More people visited Hearst Castle last year. Here’s how many
Hearst Castle attendance rose about 4.1 percent in 2019, compared to the previous year, according to statistics provided by Dan Falat, superintendent of the State Parks district that includes the historical monument.
The Castle ticket office recorded attendance of 607,462 last year, compared to attendance of 583,390 in 2018, he said in a phone interview. Last year’s increase was slightly more than 24,000 visitors on the hilltop.
Reasons for the increase in attendance
It’s usually difficult to pinpoint a single factor that causes annual attendance to go up or down. Falat attributed some of last year’s rise to factors as diverse as:
• A 14-month closure of the busy scenic-byway link between Cambria and Big Sur, due to landslides along Highway 1. That stretch reopened in July 2018.
• Traffic snarls during subsequent long projects to resurface and repair parts of the highway.
• A prolonged repair project that kept the iconic, often-photographed outdoor Neptune Pool empty for years. The project was completed and the pool refilled in August 2018.
• Fluctuating gas prices.
• Clumps of nasty weather.
• And the Castle’s temporarily decreased capacity in December 2018, due to the sudden shut-down of the bankrupt Silverado Stages bus company that month.
The bus company had for years provided service that took visitors up and down the hill to and from the rambling former estate of media magnate William Randolph Hearst.
The shutdown affected transportation during the Castle’s peak holiday season.
While a quickly remedy was reached almost immediately to bring in a temporary, substitute service, the buses provided by that contractor, Laz Parking, were smaller. Each Silverado bus held 54 people; the Laz buses held from 20 to 37 people.
Falat estimated earlier this year that having smaller buses reduced by at least 6,000 the number of visitors who could tour the Castle between the Silverado exit and the late-January start of the new permanent service from Lux Bus America. Lux took over the buses that had been Silverado’s and hired all but one of that firm’s drivers on the Castle routes.
Weather can be a factor
Of course, weather is always a factor in how many people venture out, although a storm has to be pretty gnarly for Castle officials to shut down in the interest of public safety, rather than simply switching tour routes to the predetermined storm mode (almost entirely indoors).
Falat said lots of visitors are determined to use their tickets and see the monument, no matter what the weather is. For instance, there were stormy periods right around Thanksgiving and Christmas 2019, and in 2018, the area was hammered with a lot of storms.
“If conditions are just rainy,” Falat said, “we go to our inclement-weather protocol, with tours fully guided from start to finish, from the bus up to the bus down.” Those versions drop the free-roaming feature that allows visitors to wander around the grounds on their own at the end of each tour.
Keeping people safe is the major concern in nasty weather. Conditions “can get pretty slick up here in the rain,” Falat said, but the strongest safety considerations on the hilltop are predictions of big gusts of wind, “when we have to worry about debris flying around.”
One immeasurable weather factor is the impact of advance forecasting. Early in a week, if meteorologists predict that storms, wind and other inclement weather will hit the North Coast during the upcoming weekend, some people who might otherwise have planned to take day trips or other vacations may opt for staycations instead.
How the Castle plans
“We’re getting back to more of what our normal operation has been in the past,” Falat said. “We do expect our attendance will grow.” To help plan for that, he and his team have added considerably to the rafts of data on which they rely to plan for how many people might and can visit in a given year.
It’s a delicate balancing act, he said, between “making sure we’re understanding what visitors want, to the best of our ability, as well as knowing what we really can provide and still meet our responsibility to properly protect and manage the Castle and its historic assets.”
According to their analytics, that break-point max seems to be about 850,000 visitors a year, he said.
While the Castle has accommodated about 1 million visitors in a year, he said, that level isn’t sustainable without degrading the visitor experience and potentially causing damage to the Castle, its artifacts and artworks, all of which are in State Parks’ care.
