Um good evening, everyone.

I'm gonna call to order this Joplin City Council work session for Monday, June the 9th.

Uh in the year of our Lord 2025, it is 545 p.m.

We have three items on our agenda this evening, and we are going to get them started with agenda item number one.

Mr.

Tuttle and his entourage are approaching the dice to talk to Mayor about the April 2024, March 2025 visitor profile annual report.

Mayor, before I pass it off to uh James and Joseph from down St.

Jermaine, I just want to extend an appreciation to my uh colleagues in public works and parks for all the work they did last week with us fighting the weather to get the uh World Street Painting Festival in.

The 3D art is on the ground.

If you have another yet to see it, I recommend you go out and check it out.

It's really amazing.

And uh the 10 artists, eight of them international did a fantastic job for us.

So they're all branded Route 56.

I think we had probably five to 700 people out there of the weekend already, so it's really amazing.

So uh this is just a shout out to my colleagues for all the help they gave us and uh my team as well for all the work we went through last week.

And uh I think we need to replace Dave Holden, but uh but we got it in, but the weather worked out.

So I'd like to introduce you to uh Joseph and James from down to St.

Germain who've been doing our visitor profile for us the last year, and they're here to present to you the uh final results.

Thank you, sir.

Welcome, fellas.

Hey, thank you for having us.

Uh again, my name is Joseph St.

Germain, I'm the president of Downs St.

Germain Research, means James Rendell, a project director who ran this project.

Um I'll I'll go over just a little bit of method, just tell you what we did, uh give you some of the major major insights in terms of the metrics and things of that nature, understanding the value of tourism, get a little bit into the markets, and then I'm gonna pass it over to to James to really discuss some of your visitors or give you a sense of what the visitor profile is.

Um, as a reminder, as we go through this, this study ran from April 2024 to March 2025.

So if anything happened a couple weeks ago, not relevant here.

So just wanted to get remind you as we go through that.

Um this is a full report, so there the whole office the tourism team can use this uh as a reference.

So you'll be I'll be skipping some slides as we go through.

Um and then one other thing, if you have any other questions at any time, feel free to stop me.

Um but I'm gonna start with the methodology.

So just to give you a sense of this, over 2,000 surveys were done during that year.

Um about 75 to 80 percent of the surveys were done via intercept, which means we had a we had people with iPads going through the survey as person was in the market, but we also had some that we distributed at events, like QR codes, um, whether it be at a hotel or things that things of that nature.

And then we it we were done, it was done all across.

So we were at the airport, we're at events, whether it be sports or non-sports, uh public areas like downtown, also racetrack, uh, MoCAN, and also uh George Washington Carver and a variety of attractions.

So the goal there, ultimately the goal here is to make sure it's representative of all the visitors throughout the course of the year, but of course we're not gonna interview every single person who comes on the route.

Um so let me just give you a breakdown of what tourism means to the Joplin.

Um so by taking all this data that we collected together and we actually asked each person how much they spent while in the area, uh visitors to the area spent two over 290 million dollars in in in Joplin.

I mean, that is just direct spend.

That was what they put out, took cash out of their pockets or or you know, credit card, what have you.

The total economic impact when you take into account like some of that money gets respent in in the area that the total economic impact of tourism to Joplin was over 408 million dollars during that 12-year span.

So uh just to give you a sense of uh of what that is.

Overall, it the the area welcomed over 1.1 million visitors to the area.

Let me give you a little bit of a breakdown of that.

Um, about about almost half of them were day trippers, folks coming for the day, passing through for a tour, things of that nature.

Um a little bit over one in three were people who stayed in paid accommodations, largely hotels, but also folks staying in vacation rentals, things of that nature.

And then finally, 15 percent were people who are visiting friends and rel relatives.

Basically, they're coming to the area, they're staying with their friends and relatives.

Um to give you and also to give you a sense of spend on that, even though day trippers are almost 50 percent, they they were about 16 percent of your spending.

They're only here for the day, part of the day, they're not spending as much money.

The people saying paid accommodations was about 50 percent of the of the overall spend, and those staying with friends and relatives was actually over a third of your spend.

Um the reason being, you know, your typical your typical visitor on like James get into how long they stay are you know tend to be in like the two to three day range.

Your your visitor who is coming to stay with their friends and relatives average over six days.

So they just have while they're not spending as much money on accommodations because they're staying with friends and family, they're spending more money elsewhere at like at coffee shops, at restaurants, shopping, things of that nature.

I just some of the other metrics, just to give you a sense of things, over 415,000 room nights over the course of the year.

Again, basically that's the people staying in a vacation rental, people staying in a hotel, things of that things of that nature.

And anytime I do a presentation like this, because we we do this throughout the country, and I get the question of like, okay, that's great.

You have all these big numbers, and it does help us understand how much visitors to the area spend.

But what does it mean?