Tourism and Parks: Better Together

July 27, 2023, Feature, by Seth Hendler-Voss

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How both communities and agencies benefit from merging parks, recreation and tourism functions under a unified structure

“How would you feel about moving tourism functions under your department?” The county executive posed this question during my first month as the director of parks and recreation for Prince William County, Virginia. I enthusiastically accepted without knowing I was about to join a small cadre of agencies with the dual responsibility of serving both residents and outside visitors.

Prior to 2017, the Discover Prince William and Manassas Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) was a quasi-independent, 501(c)(6) self-governed entity, but beholden to the Board of County Supervisors (BOCS) for 100 percent of their transient occupancy tax; i.e., “hotel tax” revenue. Following a performance audit that recommended more third-party oversight, the BOCS wanted options to move the needle on tourism promotion — specifically capturing a share of the growing travel sports market. The county executive identified nearly $200,000 in operating cost savings if the CVB merged directly into the county government structure, and the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism was born.

Six years later, Prince William County’s tourism market is thriving, jumping from the ninth to the seventh largest tourism economy in Virginia, due in large part to the collaborative synergies between two agencies with a shared talent for experience curation.

Reflecting on the myriad community benefits Prince William County realized by consolidating tourism and park and recreation functions left me wondering what similar models exist across the park and recreation sphere and how our shared experiences might inspire other communities to follow suit.

The Park/Tourism Connection

The nexus between the U.S. tourism industry and parks dates back more than 100 years, to the creation of the National Park System and the proliferation of the automobile, which unlocked remote, unspoiled landscapes to millions of people seeking escape from urban areas. According to the National Park Visitor Spending Effects report, approximately 297 million people visited a national park in 2021 — equivalent to nearly 80 percent of the U.S. population. A 2016 survey by AAA showed that 85 percent of Americans have visited at least one national park, and 73 percent said national parks were a “must-see” vacation destination.

Today, outdoor recreation and travel sports have a major impact on the U.S. tourism economy. A 2021 Sports Events and Tourism Association study indicated Americans spent $39.7 billion on sports-related travel expenditures, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported $454 million (1.9 percent) in Gross Domestic Product attributed to the outdoor recreation economy in 2021. These numbers lead one to assume the consolidation of parks and tourism management under a single governing entity would be common, but the rarity of such a model is glaring. Of the approximately 10,000 public park and recreation agencies in the United States, only a small fraction appear to contain a tourism marketing function. Interestingly, the majority of these “unified structures” exist in South Carolina and Virginia. Most of the unified agencies are found in small rural and suburban communities with less than 100,000 people.

Tourism Operation Structures

Most local tourism entities, also known as destination marketing organizations (DMOs), are structured as quasi-government units with operating autonomy granted by the local government taxing authorities that formed them and control their revenue. Examples of independent DMOs include CVBs, tourism authorities, chambers of commerce and regional tourism boards. According to Destinations International (DI), the global association for tourism destination professionals, about 10 percent of the 2,500 DMOs in the United States are integrated into a city, county or state government agency. There are no standard operational alignments for DMOs nested within local government organizations, but tourism functions are most commonly found in economic development, park and recreation, and communications departments, or function as standalone departments.

Follow the Synergies

The logic behind Prince William County’s consolidation is simple to grasp. Public parks and cultural sites draw the bulk of outside visitors, which the former parks and recreation department and CVB were marketing in parallel. Prince William County boasts two national parks, the Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail, two national wildlife refuges, one state park, the National Marine Corps Museum, 15 local historic sites, a bicycle motocross (BMX) track and two waterparks, among other assets. When weighing options for structuring or realigning tourism functions, “it’s important that communities assess and understand what their tourism strengths are,” says Kevin Costello, Prince William County’s Office of Tourism (OT) administrator. “Know why visitors come to your destination and what they do while there. If the answers align with your parks and recreation assets and functions, then merging tourism makes sense.”

Local leaders should engage with community and tourism business stakeholders to inform structuring decisions. “When the park system assets and recreational interests of the citizens align with those of the visitor, you have a product the DMO can work with, promote and sell,” Costello says. And in Prince William County, history sells. The county operates a battlefield, 19th century jail, freed enslaved house and original slave quarters, among other sites. The Office of Historic Preservation (OHP) and OT team coordinate group bus tours that bring 150,000 visitors annually. OT group sales staff sell the tours and OHP historians provide the onsite interpretive programming. “This type of teamwork helps both tourism and historic preservation achieve mutually beneficial goals; OT meets their group sales goals and OHP meets their visitation goals,” explains Costello.

The same synergies apply to sports tourism, where OT staff have direct access to schedulers and maintenance crews to coordinate field permitting, as well as the abundance of recreation division staff and park rangers for onsite assistance with special event production. Under the previous structure, there was a tendency for each entity to hoard their time and material resources with no incentive to collaborate — sometimes resulting in lost opportunities for the wider community, which cares little where the dividing lines of government service delivery are drawn.

In addition to an external focus, we view tourism promotion as a local proposition whereby we inspire our own community members to visit undiscovered places and new programs in their own community, saving them travel costs while supporting our local businesses. This emerging “backyard tourism” philosophy enables us to direct more resources into marketing our parks and generating new customers — and ultimately, new advocates who will support increased investment in parks.

Roanoke County’s Realignment

Like Prince William County, communities can realign the structure of tourism operations to meet their strategic goals. Southwest of Prince William County, on the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley, Roanoke County, Virginia, features a relatively new unified structure with a string of successes. Local leaders moved tourism functions from the economic development department to the parks and recreation department 15 years ago due to a new focus on attracting soccer and baseball tournaments to increase outsider spending. Today, the county generates most of its visitation from outdoor recreation offerings, such as hiking, mountain biking, river sports and camping. Its single marketing team promotes their park system to local and outside audiences.

Assistant County Administrator Doug Blount isn’t aware of many unified agencies like Roanoke’s, and he recommends the opportunity to any director or local leader considering the idea. “Tourism impact is very measurable, and by starting with the right goals and metrics, a community can’t go wrong given how much money families are spending these days on youth sports,” he attests. Roanoke County believes in the winning strategy of leveraging parks for tourism growth as evidenced by its $6.8 million investment in Explore Park, a 1,100-acre passive-use and adventure park that draws thousands of visitors annually, many of whom venture in from the Blue Ridge Parkway. Originally planned as a privatized American frontier-themed amusement park and then a luxury resort, the property was mothballed before the county leased it from the Virginia Recreational Facilities Authority for $1 a year with a vision to create a top travel destination for outdoor sports enthusiasts in the Southeastern United States. And its foresight is paying dividends. Last year, the park’s attendance crested 200,000, an increase from 30,000 in 2013 when the county signed the lease.

Rock Hill Gets Out Front First

For more than three decades, the City of Rock Hill, South Carolina, has capitalized on the value of unification. They recently built a 180,000-square-foot sports center that serves residents on the weekdays and mainly visitors on the weekends. The city’s Hospitality Tax covers the annual debt service on the facility as well as staffing costs. Projects like this and the Rock Hill Outdoor Cycling Center have propelled this small southern community into a sports tourism mecca, generating $82 million in direct economic impact annually ($40 million from the indoor sports center alone) — all under the leadership of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism (PRT). According to PRT Director John Taylor, who helped build Rock Hill’s tourism industry from scratch in the late 1980s, 70 percent of their annual operating revenue comes from fees and tourism revenue. “We’re now looked at as an essential department, like fire and police, because of the economic vitality we help create. And using outside revenue, we’re able to build Class A facilities for our kids. Tourism made us relevant and helped us achieve central-department status.” City leadership has not looked back since its decision to create a tourism function within the parks and recreation department. Its first large tourism facility investment barely passed with a 4-3 vote by the city council. The past seven to eight projects have passed 7-0.

Advantages to Unification

Two key advantages stand out for unifying park and recreation and tourism operations: access and capital investment. DMOs imbedded in park and recreation agencies have easier access to the purse-string holders and policymakers through which tourism revenue must flow. Having worked for quasi-independent tourism entities, like the Steuben County CVB outside of Corning, New York, Costello sees the “sense of stability” as a key advantage to unified structures. “In my previous employment, the CVB was viewed as an outside agency like any other organization coming in during the budget process making a pitch for resources to the elected officials. Being within local government, we are a part of the team, a part of the bigger picture implementing a strategy approved and supported by the elected officials. Knowing we are on the inside makes it that much easier to focus on the task at hand and not have to focus on how we are going to get our funding.”

Most DMOs enjoy dedicated revenue streams levied on hotels and short-term rentals. Depending on the enabling legislation — commonly from the state level — DMOs can spend funds broadly on marketing as well as product development, such as new sports facilities and event production grants. Through unified structures or partnerships, park and recreation agencies have more sway over where tourism revenue is directed and can compel investment in park infrastructure that will serve residents and visitors alike. When separated, park and recreation agencies seeking funds for expensive capital construction are subject to the investment whims of the DMO.

Unification Risks

Independent DMOs may resist unification for fear of bureaucracy suppressing the agility necessary to respond quickly to trends and take calculated risks. Frequent elected leadership turnover, political interference and forced questionable spending decisions by non-tourism professionals within the hierarchy of the government also cause trepidation. Nonetheless, these obstacles can be overcome by educating elected leaders from the onset of unification about the need to view tourism as a commercial enterprise that requires special allowances to operate in the vein of a for-profit entity as well as discipline about focusing limited tourism revenue on the greatest return on investment.

Germinating Unification in Higher Education

Many academic institutions merge outdoor studies, environmental conservation, community recreation and tourism under a single program or department given the common thread of leisure time, so it is surprising that so few unified structures exist in practice. Perhaps these tracks of study are more segregated than their program names suggest, leading some students to lose the chance to grasp how the industries can and should be integrated. Dr. Harrison Pinckney, assistant professor in Penn State University’s Department of Recreation, Parks and Tourism Management (PSU RPTM), says the academy “needs to help students be creative about how they go into the leisure field. They may come in and see themselves as parks, recreation or tourism practitioners, but we need to get them to think about the three collectively so they can go out into the workforce and influence unification.”

Dr. Peter Newman, department head of PSU RPTM, states institutions like his help students see linkages but acknowledges external factors of governance create separations outside campus walls. “In academia, it’s important to highlight the linkages among tourism and recreation and parks, but in reality, we know that funding drives the governance structures that can create divisions between public and private organizations.” Indeed, the guarding of limited resources is the mortar of silo-building in local government, and future park and recreation leaders need to help elected leaders think beyond old structures and think about their strategic goals as driving the most effective operating structures and funding models, not the reverse.

The Future of Tourism and Parks

The outdoor recreation sector will increase its share of the national tourism economy as population growth pressures elevate national consciousness about the value of our remaining wild places and rural areas, bringing the link between parks and recreation and tourism into clearer focus. By aligning with tourism professionals who often have greater economic development credibility, backed by sizable data research operations, park and recreation professionals can strengthen their case for conservation resources from local and state leaders. “When you look at places considered the ‘most livable cities,’ they do a good job of balancing what Benton McKaye called ‘the rural, wild and urban tissue’ of the landscape. Park and tourism professionals can work together to protect these values and keep our ecosystems intact,” says Newman.

Even if functioning as separate organizations, park and recreation and DMO professionals still can partner to advocate for sustainable destination stewardship. Jack Johnson, the chief advocacy officer with DI, views park and recreation entities and DMOs as destination stewards with the shared goal of “seeking both a successful amount of use of the parks, as well as managing them in a way that they are available for future generations.” He sees an opportunity for greater coordination between industries to promote unification: “On the national level, we at DI would love to engage with NRPA on how best to help local communities form these partnerships. Through education and tools that the two of us could potentially provide, further cooperation and partnerships could be stimulated.”

No Looking Back

Welcoming tourism functions into our department was the right move for a high-performing department already pushing the boundaries of conventional service delivery through our place-making sensibility and skills in experience curation, storytelling and branding. The merger of two creative forces breathed new life into the organization and emboldened staff to take new risks. Our joint mission challenges our team to view our work more holistically and see beyond the service delivery walls of our own making. Most importantly, our residents are the prime beneficiaries of our unification success story in the form of increased levels of service made possible by outside dollars steered into our community to offset local taxpayer burden. There is no one-size-fits-all operating model for tourism functions within a community, but for organizations like Prince William County Parks, Recreation and Tourism with a brand centered on cultural and natural resources, we’re better together.

Seth Hendler-Voss is Director of Parks, Recreation and Tourism at Prince William County.