Innovative Idea for Creating More Opportunity

Tourism Improvement Districts (TIDs) have been around for many years and have demonstrated that they produce results for communities wanting to grow. Grow their economies, drive more revenues for their hoteliers & hospitality industry, and are a key part of a destination developing and evolving to add value for residents. They are complex and require a lot of communication, education, and transparency. If nearly 200 communities and 18 states currently (and the list is growing) have formed or have formed TIDs, why wouldn’t the Quad Cities regional destination look at this as a possible solution and opportunity for us to explore and potentially pursue?

Every community is different in their approaches in how they fund tourism marketing and transient occupancy tax (hotel/motel tax revenues) cannot be the only source. As a private, non-profit organization and like so many other non-profits, stable funding is critical. However, what we are having conversations about with TIDs is that our leading goal is not a bottom-line pursuit for Visit Quad Cities. We are looking at this innovative idea for our destination because we are behind other markets that we compete with daily for share. This is fact and puts us at a competitive disadvantage. We must have tools to market the region as bid fees to sustain or acquire new events continues to increase, and we need to have the promotional muscle required to continually build more visibility to accomplish the broad community goals that we all share.

If we are going to grow visitation, sustain hospitality industry jobs, and drive increased revenues for hoteliers, our destination must have additive resources to do this. We do need to address our organization’s inflow of revenues from the public sector, and we are addressing that in a thoughtful and strategic way as we continue to manage through the endemic. Our Board of Directors has been having meaningful discussions about tourism funding and how we can best approach hotel/motel tax revenues. There is progress being made as we can leverage increases in our organization’s budget with a TID to create economies of scale with our destination’s marketing efforts.

We are putting in the time and research on TIDs, so we understand the mechanics, the risks and, most importantly, the opportunities. This is a supply/demand challenge in the QC because we have a lot of hotel rooms in supply in comparison to our competitive sets so there is a necessity for increasing demand and demand generators to meet supply and bolster more revenues. Our colleagues around the country have been extremely helpful in sharing their respective TID formation stories and let’s not forget we compete with them regularly for business. The model works and we plan over the next several months to have more dialogue and discussions with our hospitality partners and stakeholders to show return on value.  

The destination marketing industry and those connected to tourism around the country are rapidly evolving and future proofing their destinations. This is our goal for the Quad Cities and why we feel the conversation on TIDs is worthwhile to have.

Dave Herrell

President and CEO

Visit Quad Cities