Spokane Valley TPA Commission Regular Meeting - February 19, 2026
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Spokane Valley TPA Commission Regular Meeting - February 19, 2026
The Spokane Valley Tourism Promotion Area (TPA) Commission met on February 19, 2026, at 10:00 AM at City Hall. The meeting covered the final 2025 financial report, administrative updates including data from CoStar and Placer.ai, a proposal to move an Opportunity Fund code text amendment to City Council, and a detailed marketing presentation from 116 & West. The commission reached consensus on the code amendment and agreed to cancel the March meeting.
Public Comments & Testimony
- No public comments were received; no one signed up to speak.
Financial Report
- Sarah Farr, Accounting and Finance Program Manager, presented the final year-end report for 2025 TPA fees. Total revenues for 2025 were $1,354,000, slightly above budget. The budget for 2026 remains at $1.3 million. No questions were raised.
Administrative Report
- Lesli Brassfield presented a comprehensive administrative update:
- CoStar Data (December 2025): Spokane Valley hotel occupancy was 46%, down 3% year-over-year. The average daily rate (ADR) was $87. By comparison, the Spokane group of 24 hotels had an occupancy of 42.6% and an ADR of $121. January 2026 data will be available next week.
- Q4 Analytics (116 & West): Campaign performance was impacted by holiday advertising competition, increasing cost-per-click. However, digital display and Meta advertising (Facebook/Instagram) using new creative drove higher engagement. The Discover the Valley website saw a 10% increase in active users and a 23% rise in sessions.
- Placer.ai Data (December): Out-of-market visitors (non-residents stopping at least 10 minutes) totaled 212,000. Among visitors traveling 150+ miles, there were 42,000 total visitors, 49,000 trips, 97,000 visit nights, and $5.4 million in visitor spend. Top spending categories were hotels, retail, groceries/food stores, restaurants, and automotive. Spokane Valley ranked 9th among Washington cities for visitor spend.
- Legislative Update: House Bill 2278, which would make the additional $3 TPA fee permanent, has passed the House Committee on Finance and is awaiting referral to the House Rules Committee.
- March Meeting: Brassfield proposed canceling the March meeting due to staff availability and the need to prepare the code amendment for council. Commissioners agreed by consensus.
Discussion Items
- Opportunity Fund Code Text Amendment (Action Item): Tony Beattie presented the updated language, which clarifies that the City Council's authority to reject the commission's recommendation must be an all-or-nothing vote. The amendment also allows the commission to bring recommendations to council via consent agenda or as a regular action item. Commissioners expressed support and reached consensus to move the amendment forward to City Council. No public comment was received.
- Marketing Update (116 & West): Jessica McDonnell and Callie Magenza presented the 2026 strategy:
- Strategy Recap: Three focus areas: hotel promotion ($220,000 paid media), course promotion ($50,000), and Discover the Valley tourism brand ($50,000). The shift from 2025 includes dropping C Vent (meeting planner platform) due to low ROI (only 2 of 22 awarded proposals in the Valley) and reallocating those funds to hotel promotion. Ottawa placement (Expedia) will begin March 1 for a three-month trial.
- Paid Media Plan: For February–May only, to allow data-driven pivots. Eight ad groups targeting sporting events and regional attractions.
- Consumer Journey Discussion: Presenters explained that hotel bookings involve a 71-day journey across 277+ touchpoints, with OTAs dominating. They argued that measuring success solely by direct bookings from the DMO website is unrealistic. Instead, they propose tracking site visits, unique visitors, and promo code usage. Commissioners (notably Grant) pushed for some room-night attribution, noting the need to demonstrate ROI to City Council. Ideas included trackable phone numbers, unique email addresses (for group rates), and promo codes hosted on the places to stay page.
- Performance Metrics: Places to stay page users increased 698% year-over-year. Hotel link clickouts and property link clicks saw triple-digit growth.
- Canadian Visitors: Based on Washington State Tourism data, the return of Canadian transient visitors is not expected until 2027, but sports groups from Canada continue to travel. Paid media will not currently target Canada.
- Creative Direction: Messaging for 2026 will focus on “Family Travel Approved” and “Team Travel Approved” to appeal to group travelers.
Key Outcomes
- Opportunity Fund Code Text Amendment: The commission reached consensus to direct staff to move the amendment to City Council for introduction. The amendment will go through three readings at council, likely beginning in March or later.
- March Meeting Cancellation: The commission agreed to cancel the March 2026 meeting; the next meeting will be in April.
- Marketing Direction: The commission acknowledged the updated marketing strategy and the planned OTA trial. No formal vote was taken, but the discussion highlighted the need for measurable attribution. The 116 & West team committed to providing trackable tools (promo codes, custom emails) and ongoing data reviews.
Meeting Transcript
10 o'clock, ready when you are. Good morning. We can call to order our TPA commission meeting February 19th at 10 o'clock. Perfect. Do we have any public comment to start? No one signed up. Don't believe anyone wants to speak. No, uh, that uh looks like we will jump right in to uh financial report. Oh, so that's from Leslie, but we can that was my fault. Good morning, Commissioners. Sarah Farr Accounting and Finance Program Manager. Uh today, I guess we're just going to go through a quick financial report. This is the final year end report for the TPA fees that have been collected for 2025. And really, um, according to your packet, you'll see that they they came in pretty close to what we had budgeted for the year. Um, the final revenues came in at 1,354,000. Um, so just a little bit above what we had budgeted. Um do you have any questions for me regarding that? I mean, pretty straightforward. Most of you have been through this before, but happy to answer any questions on that process. Our budget for 26 real quick was still budgeted at the 1.3 million for revenues for next year. So we'll continue to watch that as those revenues come in and make some adjustments throughout the year if necessary. But right now we'll just keep watching those revenues. We just want to know where all of our money is from 2020, 2021 to 2022. Seriously, I mean I know. It's not you. Right. Questions? Okay. Well, if you do come up with any questions, we're happy to answer those. This one does have less later. Yes. Yeah. Good morning, commissioners. And uh, my apologies to Sarah. I was out on vacation last week, and I think I had asked her to uh come today, and I forgot to update Robin before she put the agenda online. So sorry about that. And we're always glad to have somebody from finance here. Sometimes it their schedules get crazy, and so we try to step in, and other times though, it's just a good to have their, whether it's Chelsea or Sarah, have them in front of you periodically. So thanks to them for doing that. Um, we have quite the packet for you here today, actually. Um, I don't know what that's saying is, uh, kill them with data or whatever, right? It's a lot going on. Um, so I'm gonna go through this relatively quickly because we do have two important items on the agenda here after the administrative report. Um but uh so we'll just kind of go through this uh section by section. Um, and then if you have more questions, uh we can either dive in um at another time uh or I can loop back or whatever. Um so the first thing uh that you're gonna see in today's report, of course, is our co-star data for the month of December. Uh reported occupancy for the Spokane Valley Hotels was at 46%. We were down this month over a month, uh month, a year ago, about three percent. As you can see, we've gone up sometimes in month over month, and then um we've been down. So um and uh our daily average reported daily rate uh was 87 in comparison.
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