Marion supports tourism brochure

It’s been four years since Smyth County’s tourism association produced a marketing brochure. Its successor, for which advertising is being sold now, will be bigger and better, the association’s director told Marion’s town council members Tuesday night.

“I need brochures,” Ron Thomason told the council. “Why do I need brochures? Because things are happening in tourism.”

Things like requests for information about Smyth County’s attractions, generated by the tourism association’s own advertising. The supply of the ’08 brochure, 50,000 of which were printed for distribution to visitors centers and mailing to fulfill requests, is low enough to prompt Thomason to ask the council to give back those he handed them for review at the start of his presentation.

Marion has an advertisement in the middle of the current brochure, and Thomason wanted the town to advertise in the new brochure.

The town appropriates funds in its budget to the tourism association. In fact, the accounts payable approved Tuesday included $22,380 for the regional tourism association. That figure represents the town’s per capita $3.75 tourism allocation for a population of 5,968, Town Manager John Clark said Thursday.

Thomason said the town could use part of its allocation to cover the ad, but he said that money is needed for the association’s other marketing efforts.

Thomason showed the council a stack, probably two inches thick, of sheets of computer-printed mail address labels representing hundreds of destinations for brochures and other information requested by viewers of the association’s advertising.

“We’ve mailed 10,000 brochures in the last month,” he said.

Those requests for information are triggered by ads placed in publications like the Virginia Travel Guide. A letter this month to Thomason from Jo Diedrich, director of advertising for the guide, said the Virginia Tourism Corporation “mails out an average of 8,000 copies of the guide per week, all year long, to people that request a copy.”

Additional copies are distributed at each visitor and welcome center in Virginia, she said.

The council voted to buy a $1,200 ad in the new brochure.

Mayor David Helms noted the town has more to advertise, including the golf course, formerly the private Holston Hills Country Club.

Thomason said Smyth still falls far behind Wythe and Washington counties in tourism revenues. Virginia Tourism Commission figures for 2010 show expenditures in Smyth of $21.2 million, but almost $108.9 million in Wythe and $86.8 in Washington.

But VTC shows those figures as economic impact of domestic travel, not tourism, neither of which is simple to quantify.

The U.S. Travel Association’s Travel Economic Impact Model acknowledges the ambiguity: “There is no commonly accepted definition of travel in use at this time. For the purposes of the estimates herein, travel is defined as activities associated with all overnight and day trips to places 50 miles away or more, one way, from the traveler’s origin and any overnight trips away from home in paid accommodations. The word tourism is avoided in this report because of its vague meaning. Some define tourism as all travel away from home while others use the dictionary definition that limits tourism to personal or pleasure travel.”

However it is defined, Virginia sees tourism as big business, calling it one of the state’s “most powerful industries, bringing in billions of dollars in tax revenue and supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs for Virginians.”

The state said in 2010 tourism generated $18.9 billion in visitor spending, supported 204,000 jobs and provided $1.3 billion in state and local taxes.

“State tax revenues generated by tourism in Virginia are estimated to be enough to pay for salaries and benefits of more than 11,000 new state police officers, or education of more than 75,000 Virginia students, or maintaining more than 55,000 miles of Virginia roads annually,” the state website said.

Those familiar with the abundance of motels and truck stops in Wythe County aren’t surprised that locality rakes in more travel-related dollars than others. But for Thomason, Smyth County can catch up. He told Marion’s council he believes Smyth holds more attractions for tourists than its neighbors.

Tourism took the national spotlight Thursday as President Barack Obama announced at Disney World in Orlando a strategy to capitalize on the America’s attractions. More than 1 million American jobs could be created over the next decade if the U.S. increased its share of the international travel market.

Obama’s plan focuses in part on streamlining tourist visa applications and attracting visitors from the world’s growing economies like China and Brazil to the U.S.’s “national treasures, “iconic destinations in our national parks, wildlife refuges, cultural and historic sites, monuments and other public lands,” the White House said.

The White House said Thursday U.S. tourism and travel industry “is a substantial component of the nation’s gross domestic product and employment, representing 2.7 percent of GDP and 7.5 million jobs in 2010, with international travel to the United States supporting 1.2 million jobs alone.”

dkegley@wythenews.com