Whose Sedona Is It, Anyway?
The Arizona City—Long Defined by Visitors and Outsiders—Is Fighting Over the ‘Right Kind’ of Tourist
You’d think that a town dependent on tourist dollars could never stop advertising itself. But in Sedona, Arizona, as wealthy residents’ weariness of riffraff jamming up their roads sparked a bitter rift over what constitutes “the right kind” of visitors, that’s just what has happened.
After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sedona’s city government and chamber made a joint agreement to quit advertising the town in glossy national travel magazines and doing social media posts targeted at rich people, reasoning that such money would be wasted during an international shutdown. …