At last month’s Georgia Governor’s Tourism Conference Gov. Brian Kemp boasted of the state’s record breaking year. Nearly 12 million visitors to the state spent an estimated $31 billion in 2018, up some 5 percent from the previous year, and generated an overall economic impact of a staggering $66.2 billion.
The city of Atlanta, with the world’s largest airport and its smorgasbord of attractions including aquariums, stadiums, and museums, is naturally the state’s most visited city. Savannah, the state’s oldest and most historic city, comes in second.
But another Georgia city had a banner year in fiscal year 2019, greeting more than 2 million visitors for the first time ever – Columbus.
It was a banner year for the state’s third largest city, which saw $364 million spent locally by tourists, and a big jump in visitors after relatively steady numbers over the past half-decade.
How to explain the jump? According to one local expert, a shift in marketing strategy.
“We’ve shifted our messaging to target more of a leisure market, and we specifically targeted multi-gen travelers,” Columbus State University professor Dr. Benjamin Blair told the Columbus Ledger Enquirer. “These were boomers traveling with millennials traveling with extended family, so we had parents and children and grandchildren and in some instances, this research said, there would be aunts and uncles and cousins and so forth, so we shifted our message to that audience.”
Between the largest urban whitewater rafting course in the world going straight through downtown and museums such as the Coca-Cola Space Science Center and National Infantry Museum, more and more travelers from around the Southeast and beyond are waking up to Columbus’ potential as a tourism destination.
And Columbus’ rise hasn’t one unnoticed. Peter Bowden, President and CEO of Visit Columbus was honored with the Tom Kilgore Lifetime Achievement Award at the Georgia Governor’s Tourism Conference in recognition of his “outstanding lifetime commitment towards tourism.”
So if you’re looking for a weekend getaway this fall look no further than Georgia’s own Columbus – and find out what more that two million travelers are talking about.
