TRAVEL INSIDER : Vacation Planning and Political Correctness : Trends: A proposed gay boycott of Colorado shows how tourism dollars can be cast like ballots.

You’ve found the right hotel. You’ve got the air fare nailed down. You’ve even checked the weather. You’ve done all you can think of to prepare for your next U.S. vacation.

Now think again. About civil rights, state holidays, gubernatorial candidates and boycott campaigns.

If the fallout from this month’s elections is fair indication of what’s to come--and several professionals in travel and politics suggest that it is--more and more American travelers will be asked by social activists to consider their travel itineraries as political documents. Whether travelers intend it or not, their journeys may be seen as statements on the laws and political leanings of their destinations.

“There must be economic consequences of raw hatred and discrimination,” editorialized publisher Niles Merton of the gay-activist magazine The Advocate, responding earlier this month to the passage of a Colorado ballot measure that limits civil-rights protections for homosexuals. “Boycott Colorado!” Colorado officials reply that a boycott would unfairly target the state, and note that legal appeals are in progress.

Whether travelers will go along with urgings such as Merton’s is still an open question in Colorado and elsewhere. But as tourism continues to grow as one of the nation’s leading industries, and states scramble to attract visitors, many say that political correctness skirmishes are inevitable.

“You have a huge customer base out there, and they’re going to go not only to places that are properly promoted, but places where, politically, they’ll feel welcome,” predicted Philip R. Peach, executive director of the Oregon Lodging Assn.

“Everybody is looking for the tourism dollar these days, and it is easy to not go to one place, and go to another,” said one foreign consulate official in Los Angeles. “So I think the states had better watch out, if they’re interested in those tourism dollars.”

Travelers have usually passed such judgments informally, for example those choosing not to make international trips to destinations such as South Africa or China. Convention planners for decades have been alert to who was getting their business, and some committed Equal Rights Amendment backers steered clear of unsupportive states in the 1970s. But only recently, many travel and politics professionals say, have individual U.S. travelers been so loudly asked to carry such heavy ideological baggage.

The most notable collision of politics and the domestic travel business came in Arizona in 1987, when the state failed to set aside a holiday in the name of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Larry Hilliard, vice president of the Phoenix and Valley of the Sun Convention and Visitors Bureau in Arizona, reported that after the holiday controversy, a national boycott campaign led 166 groups to explicitly cancel conventions and other meetings there. The number of would-be visitors affected was nearly 165,000. Direct and indirect economic impact was estimated at $190 million, which Hilliard described as conservative, since many other groups may have stayed away without announcing their reasons.

“I don’t care what you tell them, I don’t care how much information you put out, that didn’t make any difference,” said Hilliard. “It feels really good to have that behind us.”

On election day this year, Arizona’s voters supported creation of a King holiday. In the following days, Hilliard said, his office sent letters to each of the 166 groups that had spurned his area, and can now claim to be the only state in the union whose King holiday has been directly endorsed by the electorate.

In 1991, when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke announced his candidacy for governor of Louisiana, that state’s business community rallied against him, warning that tourism to New Orleans would suffer enormously with Duke as governor. He was defeated, and this year much national attention shifted to Oregon and Colorado, where voters were facing gay-rights-related ballot measures.

Oregon’s Measure 9 attracted headlines nationwide for its bluntness in limiting civil-rights protections for homosexuals, and prompted energetic opposition from tourism industry leaders. The Oregon Lodging Assn. publicly opposed the measure, and reported that organizers of at least 20 major conventions, carrying an estimated economic impact of $20 million, would go elsewhere if Measure 9 succeeded. It failed.

But Colorado’s Amendment 2, couched in milder language and overshadowed by a controversial tax-limit proposal reminiscent of California’s Proposition 13, attracted far less pre-election attention. The Colorado Tourism Board, for instance, took no position on Amendment 2, said public relations manager Sandy Torres.

“Everything indicated that this was going to be defeated,” said Torres.

Yet it passed, drawing 53% of the state vote. Specifically, the measure prohibits Colorado and its local governments from passing gay-rights laws and repeals exisiting anti-bias ordinances in Denver, Boulder and Aspen.

“I suspect that the travel industry . . . never really gave it much thought,” speculated the Oregon Lodging Assn.’s Peach. Now, he warned, “it’s not going to do any good to say, ‘Never mind what the voters said.’ The travel industry is going to see a significant negative impact. . . . People will not forget that a state’s voters have spoken and made it the known, official, anti-gay state, out of the 50 states in the Union.”

Colorado tourism officials are quick to protest that description, arguing that state and federal laws continue to protect all citizens from discrimination. They also note that voters in Denver, Boulder and Aspen were heavily opposed to the measure. But the state has a public relations battle ahead.

Wayne Whiston, editor of Our World, a national gay travel magazine, said he too planned to call for a boycott. San Francisco-based author Armistead Maupin announced that he had canceled a book-promotion visit to the state. One group, the American Assn. of Physicians for Human Rights, announced that it would abandon its plans to convene there, but tourism officials said those reservations had apparently not yet been made.

Conversely, at hotels around the state, backlash seemed to be minimal. Representatives of the Westin Resort Vail and the Telluride Chamber of Commerce reported no response to the vote. At the exclusive Hotel Jerome in Aspen, general manager Tony DiLucia reported that he’d taken “about four” cancellations in protest.

But group travel planners tend to deliberate over decisions longer than individual travelers do, and their response isn’t clear yet. In the Colorado tourism office, anxiety is sky high.

Asked her advice for travelers concerned about Colorado, the state tourism board’s Sandy Torres very nearly pleaded. “ Come ,” she said. “ Absolutely come to Colorado. We’ve worked hard to develop an image as a friendly state.”

Similar pleas come from other tourism officials.

“You can boycott Denver, but you’d also be hurting the gay population in Denver and the people who voted against this,” said Rich Grant, spokesman for the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau. One of the organizations made most uncomfortable by the Colorado vote is the Gay and Lesbian Community of Aspen, which organizes the Aspen Gay Ski Week every January.

Tom Mooney, principal organizer of the 16-year-old event, had been expecting as many as 4,000 visitors to Aspen during the week of Jan. 23-30. Many of them, Mooney said, put down non-refundable deposits before the election. Mooney and other local officials decided to go ahead with the event, but added a candlelight protest march and a series of politically oriented speakers.

Meanwhile, tourism officials and political activists alike are watching Aspen and the rest of Colorado closely, and guesses about the controversy’s economic impact are all over the map.

“They’re skiers. They don’t really care,” said one Los Angeles County ski-shop worker when I called last Monday to ask about customer response to the vote. But five minutes later, when I reached Jeff Hargleroad, the president of Sportours charter operators in La Canada, the answer was different.

“This is a very serious situation,” he said. Hargleroad had arranged two charter flights from L.A. to Aspen in January, and sold a combined 110 spaces on the planes to two charter groups. But after the Colorado vote, both groups called to say they were re-evaluating the trip, and would poll their members on whether to cancel.

“This is $110,000 worth of business,” said Hargleroad. “It’s a bad deal.”