The Visit Baton Rouge board of directors on Thursday unanimously passed a $5.45 million budget for 2020, a 1% increase over the original 2019 budget.
The agency plans to spend approximately $5.77 million in 2020, up 6% from the $5.41 million spent this year. Plans call for spending some $3.1 million on promotions, nearly $2 million on personnel and $703,000 on administrative costs.
Visit Baton Rouge is funded through a share of the local hotel occupancy tax, from which it has collected some $4.3 million throughout the first nine months of 2019—a 14% increase from the same time last year.
That’s just one example of how strong a year 2019 was for the local tourism industry, says Paul Arrigo, the agency’s president and CEO, attributing a generally positive performance to crowd-drawing events like the U.S. Youth Soccer Southern Regional Soccer Tournament, the Marrucci World Series and multiple conventions. However, he doesn’t expect 2020 to bring Baton Rouge as much in revenues.
“We won’t have the soccer tournament [in 2020], and corporate business is waning right now, with the hotels being built in Ascension and across the river drawing in those business travelers and affecting our tax revenue,” Arrigo says. “In our budget, we anticipate 2020 to be higher than what we anticipated 2019 to be, but we’re not anticipating actual revenues to be as high as they were in 2019. We had a surprisingly great year.”
Still, the agency expects to attract tourists through several events it has planned for next year, including Travel South, a Michelangelo exhibit and an Association of College Honor Societies convention.
Also at Thursday’s meeting, the board passed a resolution allowing Arrigo to receive a base salary of $179,500 next year, a roughly 5% pay raise. And two goals tied to Arrigo’s performance-based incentive—for which he’s eligible to receive an additional 10% of his salary in 2021—were set, including a “room nights booked goal” of 80,000 room nights and a “tax revenue goal” of $5.445 million.
Among Arrigo’s top priorities for the new year: 1) Convince tourists, through advertising and social media, to stay an extra night in Baton Rouge when they come in for a game or conference, 2) Better inform local residents of how Visit Baton Rouge is funded, and encourage local leaders to market Baton Rouge as a host city for conventions organized by the boards they sit on, and 3) Recognize the hospitality industry as a legitimate driver of economic development.
