Eureka Springs tourism on recovery path

City Finance Director Lonnie Clark said sales and use taxes, which are collected by businesses and remitted to the state, then apportioned back to the city, were up $59,000 year-to-date over last year. In May 2011, the city collected $537,281.87, and in May this year, $596,441.71 -- an increase of about 11 percent.

"We've got more people coming to town and spending money, and we're very grateful for that," he said.

Mike Maloney, executive director of the City Advertising and Promotion Commission, knows something about more people coming to town, since the CAPC has been directly involved with making that happen.

Motels, hotels, restaurants and cafés charge a 3 percent tax on their services. Maloney said CAPC revenue is up 20 percent over last year.

"One of the things that happened in Eureka Springs was we started the year with an aggressive advertising campaign," he said. "January through March there was a substantive amount of increase in advertising for Eureka Springs, and that hadn't been done before."

The history of the CAPC was to focus on an eight-month tourism season, he said, starting around April or May and then bolster it during the summer months.

"We decided to go ahead and attack on Day One of the new year to change the dynamic to a 12-month tourism campaign."

He said the push really started in the last part of 2011, though.

"We started marketing aggressively to Benton and Washington counties and immediately saw an increase in day traffic in our county."

He said one thing the CAPC pushed was Christmas.

"We really pushed the Christmas concept very hard," Maloney said. "It's a great opportunity to come and experience what happens in Eureka Springs.

Another advertising campaign has been television ads, he said.

"As we got into the new year, we pushed television very aggressively into markets where we hadn't before, in Arkansas, of course, but also in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Missouri and Louisiana. We changed our course of action to become a major television advertiser."

He said Kansas City is a good example.

"We're in key markets like Kansas City and Overland Park and everything is tagged with our website. We look at our web analytics and can see a direct cause/effect relationship and how our television advertising is working."

And it is working, apparently, as CAPC revenue is also up.

"Last year we budgeted $1.1 million and it was a little under $1.2 million we brought in," said Maloney. "We went into 2012 with a $1.3 million advertising budget, and right now we're 20 percent ahead of where we were last year at this same time."

He said the CAPC will keep doing what it's doing.

"The strategy is basically in place. We've made the types of advertising purchases that are working. The only thing we'll change is the content of our messages, which reflect what we're doing in the community at the time. We have the CICA festival right now, the Fleur Delicious, and coming up is bluegrass, the jazz festival and the 65th annual folk festival, the oldest in the nation.

"Part of our message is a call to action to people to come visit and then get them to come back."