Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506300108
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: G-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's about $358 per person, per visit. And because hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists give part of what they receive to employees and suppliers, the impact of tourism dollars increases as they are spent over and over. As a result of that turnover each visitor, on average, represents $429 in impacts on the economy, Tech said.
Tourism means employment, too. Every 58 visitors support one job, according to the report by faculty members Michael Olson and Eliza Tse and former Tech instructor Francis Kwansa.
The report is timely. Tourism officials and sponsors of events such as the Roanoke Valley Horse Show, which concludes today, are quick to highlight the multimillion-dollar impact of tourism. But they've had limited evidence to back up their claims.
Gerald Carter, chairman of the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau's board of directors and general manager of Holiday Inn-Tanglewood, recently said the horse show has an economic impact of $11 million on the local economy. The same has been said every year for at least four years.
Martha Mackey, the bureau's executive director, acknowledged the widely used estimate has circulated in the community. The exact calculations, however, are no longer available. Mackey is only able to recreate them through some educated guesswork.
Hmm.
Mackey seems to be the type of tourism director who would no sooner give a visitor bad directions to Mill Mountain than inflate numbers measuring her industry's impact. She keeps an industrial-sized calculator on her desk, and insists her tabulations are conservative.
She said what the typical visitor spends during one day in the Valley includes $75.50 for a decent hotel room, $15 on dinner, $7 on lunch, $5 on breakfast and $10 on purchases such as gas and souvenirs. That totals $112.50.
It is possible, she said, to gauge a convention or attraction by its economic impact. It is as simple as multiplying what each visitor probably shells out daily by the number of visitors who live far enough away that they need a hotel room by the number of days the event lasts.
The Roanoke Valley Youth Soccer Club sponsored a tournament over Memorial Day weekend, during which about 2,500 kids and their parents and coaches from outside the area stayed two nights in hotels. That channeled $562,500 to hotels, restaurants, shops and gas stations.
But that type of method wasn't precise enough for the people from Tech. They stopped tourists in downtown Roanoke, on Mill Mountain and at other places and asked what they were spending and what they liked about the area.
Turns out that it costs the leisure traveler $191 per person for a one-day visit, $815 per person for a seven-day visit and $1,559 per person for a stay of between two and three weeks, the study showed. The average of $358 corresponded to a two- to three-day visit.
But the real value of the Tech study may be that it should settle the question of how many times tourist dollars cycle through the economy. Mackey's soccer event calculations ignore this cycling; she said she won't use the wild estimates of others in her field or of event promoters, who claim each dollar spent by a tourist changes hands up to six more times. That's because she doesn't trust their math.
Tech found that each tourist dollar adds about $1.20 of value to the economy.
Tourists spent their money in gift shops and clothing stores as well as at more obvious businesses geared to visitors, such as hotels and restuarants.
The portion who bought gifts such as jewelry or toys spent an average of $69. Clothing shoppers spent $77 on average, Tech researchers said.
About two-thirds of the valley's tourists live outside Virginia. About a third of them come from nearby states such as North Carolina and the rest from more distant areas.
Many of the visitors appear to live comfortably. Some 63 percent earned more than the yearly gross income for an average two-income household in the Valley, which is slightly above $44,000. The largest portion of the visitors interviewed - nearly 36 percent - told survey takers they work in a "professional" field.
Nobody is sure how many visitors there are. More than 41,000 people attended conventions and more than 45,000 people dropped in at the visitor center on the City Market during the 1993-94 fiscal year. The true number of tourists is no doubt even higher.
As for why tourists come, those surveyed told researchers the valley's three main attractions are its scenic beauty, a restful, relaxing atmosphere, and the pleasant attitudes of local residents.
That would seem to buttress the notion that tourism is a good industry to cultivate. The Valley is making millions of dollars from what for us just comes naturally.
by CNB