Corina Rufier, Haywood County tourism director, reported to the Board of Commissioners on Aug. 4 that data from the 2025 Ice Festival and other projects are guiding marketing and grant decisions aimed at increasing visitor spending and supporting local businesses.

Rufier said the Visit Haywood office used ticket sales and post-event surveys as inputs to an Event Impact Calculator developed by Tourism Economics and Destinations International to estimate visitor-driven economic impact. The tool estimated 1,664 attendees who were nonlocals, 433 room-nights, about $434,000 in direct visitor spending and $566,000 in total economic impact from a four-day Ice Festival weekend, and it supported an estimated 110 to 138 jobs.

The data-driven approach matters because it allows the county to focus limited ad spend on markets and event types that generate lodging and restaurant visits, Rufier said. "We always like to do surveys, and we asked our visitors what they did over the course of the weekend," she said, adding that 51% of visitors dined at local restaurants and 44% shopped locally.

Rufier said Visit Haywood has observed lower short-term rental bookings and shorter booking windows in 2025 than in prior years — a national trend the office tracked using AirDNA and hotel data — and launched a mid-June through September digital campaign called "Open Skies, Open Roads, Open Haywood" to attract nearby midweek travelers. The campaign offers visitors "Elk Bucks," a digital gift card spendable only at Haywood County businesses, and has 110 participating local businesses.

The tourism director also reviewed other work: a 2024 annual report, a master plan process expected to run 10 years, a rebuild of the Visit Haywood website, a capital- and marketing-grant program that awarded $237,000 to 16 projects in May and will evaluate eight capital grant applications this fall. Rufier said the department will coordinate messaging around the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene with Visit North Carolina, Explore Asheville and other partners to emphasize recovery and reopening rather than rehashing the storm.

Commissioners asked for details about event participation and where to find information. Rufier pointed them to post-event materials and to fatburgermonth.com for the culinary promotion she described. She cautioned that the Event Impact Calculator requires accurate local inputs: "If you don't have the good data to put in, what you get out is just a guess," she said.

Rufier said preliminary campaign pacing has improved booking trends compared with earlier in the summer; July pacing moved from down about 20% to roughly even with last year. She told commissioners she would report more complete campaign results at the next TDA board meeting.

The tourism update concluded with the director reminding the board that roughly half of Ice Festival attendees were local and that the office seeks to drive visitor spending back into Haywood County businesses through events, grants and targeted advertising.