The Journal of Business hosted Rose Noble, CEO of Visit Spokane, for its most recent Elevating The Conversation podcast.

The Elevating The Conversation podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, and elsewhere. Search for it on any of those platforms or the Journal's website to hear the entire conversation, but for now, here are five takeaways from the episode, which runs between 35 and 40 minutes.

1. Overall, Spokane's visitor numbers have exceeded pre-pandemic levels, but business travel still lags. When COVID hit, people were focused on essentials, which they should be. The idea of travel was just pushed all the way to the bottom. The convention space, especially, took a hard hit. So did sports business and entertainment.

We've had a slow rise back. We have just surpassed 2019 numbers in terms of the amount of people in town that are visiting. We were able to have 9.6 million people visit in 2023, which is amazing. 

We see some differences, though, in group size for conventions. That has changed due to remote work and also people looking at their business budgets. Other business sectors were affected by the pandemic, so budget-wise, business travel isn't quite where it used to be in 2019, but it's still increasing. 

In the grand scheme of things, I think Spokane actually fared really well due to our outdoor access. We had a lot of people that were leaving Seattle and coming to Spokane and enjoying our state park, our river, and those spaces that weren't confined. That helped us on the leisure side. 

With the opening of our newer sports facilities, including the soccer stadium and the Podium, we've been able to sell more events in those spaces the last couple of years, too. We're doing well compared with the industry as a whole and other destinations.

2. Placemaking is becoming a bigger emphasis in destination marketing. In addition to the resilience that Spokane has had, we have collectively been working together with partners in our facility space and our sports space, as well as thinking about the way that Visit Spokane has been engaging with the community beyond conventions. We do a lot more than just the conventions.

The conversations we're having involve how we are attracting other types of events that might not live in a facility space, something like music festivals or events centered around food, like farm-to-table festivals. We're working with our neighborhood associations on seeing how we can get them more elevated, which really falls in the line of destination development.

If we continue to focus on destination development and placemaking in addition to selling what we already have, that's going to put us on the correct path for even more success.

Something that's been interesting to me is the comedy festival that's planned for later this summer at ONE Spokane Stadium. It's an example of the destination development. That's a very creative use of space.

3. Tax revenues increase with visitor volumes. Tourism is economic development, so if you are interested in economic development at all, you're interested in tourism.

We just got our tourism impact report, and $1.489 billion dollars were spent in our county in 2023 by visitors. All of those dollars went into local businesses, big and small.

Those dollars also help generate or offset taxes for individuals who live in Spokane. Those taxpayers are basically saving just over $1,000 a year, because visitors are paying for certain things that the residents don't have to. 

That visitor spending is putting $227 million back into state and local taxes. When we talk about the city, the county, and the state trying to balance their budgets, those extra funds can go into their general fund, and then it's up to the people that we elect to make sure that those are spent appropriately.

Even more importantly, nearly 18,000 people have hospitality-related jobs that are supported by visitors coming in. Those jobs would not exist if we didn't have people coming into market, spending money, and enjoying themselves here in our region. So every year, one of the our main key performance indicators is increasing the visitor spending. 

We have to invest in order to see that grow, For every dollar that we spend, we see $9 in return. That's why it's important for us, when talking about funding, that government is actually using the dollars as they say it should for tourism promotion. Because when we're putting money in, we're generating a lot back. And the more that we can do that in Spokane specifically, the better that our community can parlay that into what we talked about earlier, destination development-type projects. 

Tourism promotion isn't just placing an ad. There's a lot of other things that are wrapped into it.

4.  Whether Spokane needs more hotel rooms is a nuanced conversation. I think I rode the fence pretty good the last time I answered that question.

We love growth in the hospitality sector. It provides jobs. It gives us more to sell.

But in the hotel world, when you're talking to hoteliers with a business mindset about metrics and key performance indicators, revenue has to increase quarter after quarter. They're looking at occupancy. They're looking at the revenue per available room and the amount of money they're getting for each room. Once again, they're going to want to see an increase in their business before they would most likely support the idea of another hotel coming into the space. 

In terms of what Visit Spokane and Spokane Sports are seeing, we do have some weekends, especially in March, where we have PNQ Northwest Qualifier volleyball tournament, the NCAA basketball tournament, and we're also trying to sell other events. If we had another hotel, it would make it easier for us.

What we have to do, and I'm quoted as saying this in a recent Journal article, is it's not just about a hotel. It's about building the experience around a hotel and making sure we have enough things happening and going on outside of the groups we're bringing to Spokane, in terms of our restaurant scene, our entertainment scene, our walkability, and transportation, that can sustain a hotel year-round.

The hotel has to be open year-round. They're not only open during March. They're not only open during the busiest weekend in September. 

We have room to improve our occupancy. So on the hotelier side, I think maybe it's not necessarily the right move right now to add more rooms. From a leisure perspective and a diversifying product perspective, it would be great to have another hotel. We look at the North Bank there, and we have the Centennial Hotel, but if we had another larger facility in the North Bank. That would be great to have, especially when we're talking youth sports facility-type activities.

I'm kind of riding the fence again, but that's what we're looking at.

5. The Expo '74 anniversary celebration could have long-lasting effects. We won't have data, really, until the event is over. We have some ideas of how it's going, just nothing attached in an actual data sense. 

It's been great PR for us. We've had great engagement and a lot of community involvement.

It's been a really fun community event, but in terms of travelers coming from outside of the region, I think we're probably a little bit lower than we had hoped, but we'll track that, and we'll give you an update.

One event attached to the Expo anniversary that had really great attendance and a lot of outside visitation was the powwow. The tribal pillar coordinators for the Expo celebration want that to be an annual event. Their goal is to eventually have it be in the Spokane Arena, which we would love to see.

There are some aspects within the whole nine-week scene of Expo that I think have room for growth. The community stage at the park is an excellent idea. It's something that takes a lot of logistics and a team to operate, but that's something that we would love to see stay in the park after the Expo celebration, if it could, as a long-term tourism attraction.