Visit Bastrop events create a tourist stop
City’s new marketing arm fills the calendar, the streets and merchant coffers.
Since its inception last fall, Bastrop’s new marketing and tourism arm has splashed one event after another on the city’s calendar.
From car shows to pub crawls — and now with last weekend’s first Bastrop Music Festival — Visit Bastrop has hit the ground running on its mission to transform the city into a tourism engine.
Last year, only months after Visit Bastrop was founded as the city’s nonprofit marketing team, events around the city became energized with more people, more local business sales and more tax dollars for the city.
On Veterans Day, the Heroes and Hot Rods car show drew a record number of exhibits and foot traffic to downtown after Visit Bastrop’s major advertising campaign that took to the airwaves, billboards and internet.
Then over the holidays, an ad campaign for the Lost Pines Christmas Celebration turned up a 22-percent increase in hotel occupancy tax revenue in December, according to the organization’s communications director, Kathie Reyer.
And the string of events continued: a pub crawl for St. Patrick’s Day, Central Texas’ Tough Mudder event in Smithville and last weekend’s music festival — the organization’s most ambitious event.
The four-day festival, which was organized in partnership with Texas Music Magazine, sold nearly 1,000 presale tickets, and its auspicious beginnings have compelled organizers to make it an annual event.
“This first year there’s a lot of lessons learned, but we expect it to be something that can continue indefinitely,” Reyer said.
“Getting a brand new 501(c)(6) marketing organization up and running and starting marketing efforts almost immediately was quite the challenge,” said Visit Bastrop President and CEO Dale Lockett.
“We have built a solid foundation and we will use Bastrop’s many assets to maximize and grow the economic impact from tourism over the rest of this year.”
Visit Bastrop was created last fall by the City Council as a destination marketing organization that will use hotel occupancy tax revenue to bolster tourism.
As a nonprofit group, Visit Bastrop receives roughly 50 percent of the tax revenue the city collects from hotels, or about $1.4 million annually. The organization is self-governed and has a 13-member board composed of members of the city’s hospitality sector, including restaurants, arts, retail and recreation.
Council members are prohibited from serving on the board so as to protect the board’s autonomy from city control and influence.
The organization has six staff members including Lockett, who was hired on an interim basis. Lockett’s contract expires in September, and the board is in the early stages of a search for his replacement.
The group’s main objective will be to “bring heads and fill beds” in Bastrop.
“There have been disjointed marketing efforts thus far,” Lockett said last year as the organization was being crafted. “You are getting bits and pieces of what Bastrop is, but you aren’t getting the full picture.”