Stats show visitors flocking to city

By Brook R. Corwin
brook@surrymessenger.com

Visitation to Mount Airy jumped 60 percent for the 2007-2008 fiscal year, with international travelers accounting for some of the new tourists.
The city’s visitor center, located on Main Street, tracks each tourist that comes through its doors. For the past fiscal year it had 62,486 visitors, an average of more than 171 per day, according to a report released last week.
That’s up from 39,010 the year prior, with every month showing an increase of at least a few hundred more people.
“The numbers were shocking to me at first with rising gas prices,” Jessica Icenhour, Mount Airy’s director of tourism, said last week. “We have not seen a downfall in our number of visitors.”
Icenhour attributed much of the gain to North Carolina residents deciding to take day trips instead of out-of-state vacations. That’s reflected in the revenues of the city’s 6 percent occupancy tax, which haven’t increased at the same pace as visitor center traffic.
But the tax is still bringing in more than before, generating around $315,000 for the 2007-2008 fiscal year. That’s up 20 percent from the year prior.
It’s enough activity to spur development of a new hotel on U.S. 601 now in the planning stages, tourism officials said during a meeting last week. The new business would be one of the chains in the Wyndham Hotel Group — which includes Super 8, Knights Inn, Howard Johnson and Days Inn — and be located beside Burger King.
Icenhour said international travelers who stay for weeks can make up for the relatively quick stays of local tourists. During the last three months, 115 visitors have come from Canada, while tourists have also arrived from England, Ireland, Brazil, Finland, Turkey, Germany, Australia, The Netherlands, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Japan, Greece, Mexico, Wales, Sweden, Thailand, Peru and Switzerland.
“We’ve seen a big increase in visitors from Canada because of the weakness of the American dollar. They can spend more here,” Icenhour said. “They stay an average of two weeks.”
The money generated by the occupancy tax goes to the city’s Tourism Development Authority, which has expanded its marketing campaign to include national publications such as Oprah Magazine, Southern Living, Women’s Day and The New York Times.
The TDA also used the funds to print 100,000 copies of the recently released 2008-2009 visitors guide, a record amount.
Rich Kunkel, chairman of the TDA, said last week that the growth in visitors needs to be linked to economic impact for the area, particularly with a meeting this week to decide how to best spend $2 million in grants from the Golden LEAF Foundation.
“Tourism is the hot growth industry in Surry County,” he said. “We’ve got to connect that to job growth.”