View the 2026 Resident Sentiment Dashboard.
Understanding the purpose of the Resident Sentiment Survey:
- Serves as Travel Oregon’s primary touchpoint with Oregon residents, helping us understand what the value about tourism as well as current and potential pain points related to the tourism industry.
- Informs KPIs that support our “Oregon Delivers Remarkable Experiences” objective.
- The results help guide Travel Oregon’s strategic work, including initiatives such as our Improve Visitor Behavior Action Plan.
- The study is used by partners across the state to inform their strategic planning and decision-making.
In terms of high level findings, residents continue to evaluate the positive impacts of tourism higher than the negative impacts of tourism. For our study, we measure resident sentiment across four dimensions, social, cultural, economic and environmental, offering an expanded view into residents’ perceptions. On a scale of 1 to 5:
- Overall positive impacts are rated at 3.6 (3.4 in 2023)
- Overall negative impacts are rated at 3.3 (3.1 in 2023)
- The dimensions with the highest rated positive impacts are Economic and Cultural.
- The dimensions with the highest rated negative impacts are environmental and social.
In terms of support for tourism, this also increased from 2023 to 2026, rising from 0.9 to 1.2. This is in line with the higher positive perceptions, and also likely responds to the environment of economic uncertainty, where communities are more likely to support initiatives for an industry that can bring in visitor dollars.
What We’ve Learned: Past Resident Sentiment Study Results
Our findings suggest that residents in Oregon perceive that the benefits of tourism currently outweigh the drawbacks.
- Oregon residents score highly on the Perceived Quality of Life index, scoring 18.1 points out of a possible 25.
- Oregonians value the state’s natural resources and feel a personal responsibility to protect and share them.
- Most Oregonians agree that increased media awareness benefits Oregon and the state should promote itself.
- More than half of Oregonians are likely to recommend their community as a tourism destination.
2024 Resident Sentiment Study
Over 6,800 responses were collected with representation from all 36 Oregon counties
- Download the full report (PDF)
- Access the Dashboard
- Download the Crosstab by county (Spreadsheet)
- View the Presentation (YouTube)
2022 Resident Sentiment Study
Due to Travel Oregon’s strategic work to help Oregon thrive economically after the COVID-19 pandemic, We created Resident Sentiment, Visitor Sentiment and Economic Recovery reports together to evaluate the progress of Oregon’s tourism industry’s recovery efforts.