With the 105th U.S. Open Championship held last June 13-20, it should surprise no one that the figures for June skyrocketed.
And did they ever. One gauges tourism by the number of hotel nights booked, and for June 2005, that total was three and a half times the normal level throughout a wide swath of the Sandhills.
But the fact that room sales also set records for July and August tells us that Moore County is doing something right besides hosting the most successful Open ever. Lots of other people continued coming here for lots of reasons long after Pinehurst Resort’s No. 2 course had gone back into the normal mode.
Some of the increase may be Open spillover, but the numbers still suggest somebody is doing something right.
Or a lot of somebodies.
X-ing Off the Days
Some of them are at the local Convention and Visitors Bureau, whose work is never done. The people there can’t afford to rest on their laurels even after helping the community pull off such a monumentally positive event as an Open. Because once it’s gone, they have to start over with a clean slate.
There are many similarities between the CVB’s work and that of, say, Moore County Partners in Progress, which seeks to lure new employers. But whereas employers come to stay, tourism events are a one-time thing, or an annually repeating thing at best.
“When you bring a company into your community, they’re here 365 days a year, hopefully for years to come,” says Caleb Miles, president and CEO of the CVB. “In tourism, we try to convince an organization or a company that has a big event to bring it here. And once they’ve come and met and spent money, we have to turn around and fill that spot again. We’re looking at days on a calendar, X-ing them off.”
A Good Summer Anyway
The Open is our Super Bowl, but the point is that we would have had a pretty good summer even without it.
“That’s because we’ve been able to work with people in our community — and in other communities — to bring in other events,” Miles says. “And we’re trying to determine now what else we can add to the build here that will enable us to host even more.”
Among post-Open events that helped fill rooms here were the N.C. Tennis Association’s 2005 USA League Championships held in Moore County on the July 4 weekend and the National Bikers Roundup held in August in neighboring Richmond County.
Moore County doesn’t need more golf courses. But it may have to take a look at more first-class facilities of other kinds to keep more groups coming.
“Take amateur athletics,” Miles says. “We can host small to medium baseball tournaments and soccer tournaments, but we can’t host anything beyond a certain size. The thinking is that we could host bigger events and do it more frequently if we expanded our facilities. That would mean more athletic fields. It could mean more indoor facilities as well.”
The more attractive a community can make itself to the broadest possible range of vacation and recreational interests, then, the better chance it has of keeping those calendar days X-ed off.
So the word “diversity,” which one hears often in industry-hunting circles, is just as important in the tourism game.
