Visit Beaufort, chamber and hospitality groups urge balanced visitor growth and investment in shoulder seasons

Rob Wells, president and CEO of Visit Beaufort, told partners at the City of Beaufort’s partners-day retreat that data from calendar year 2024 show visitors represented roughly 36% of cell-phone traffic in the marketplace and about 22% of consumer spending in the destination. Wells said monthly monitoring found never reaching a 1-to-1 visitor-to-resident ratio across the year and that visitor spending averaged about $421 per overnight stay. He also said food spend is the single largest share of visitor spending and that military graduations remain a large, stabilizing source of demand.

Wells said occupancy in 2024 was up about 2% even while average daily rates trended down, and that hotels cut rates in late 2023 and did not fully recover until late 2024. He described ongoing efforts to diversify market channels—group travel, sports tourism, meetings and international visitors—and to track visitor origin markets and seasonality so marketing dollars can move where they have the most return.

Megan Morris, president of the Beaufort Regional Chamber of Commerce, and Ashley Calk, president and CEO of the Beaufort Area Hospitality Association, said their organizations are coordinating to support small businesses, diversify the economy and build a local workforce pipeline. Morris said the chamber will release updated economic and community-sector data at its March “State of the Community” event and flagged military retention, workforce development and attainable housing as top local priorities. Calk highlighted initiatives that support January and other shoulder-season demand—New Year’s Eve fireworks and the Oyster Festival—and a hospitality labor-health pilot (a low-cost primary-care-like membership service) intended to support hospitality workers who often lack employer health benefits.

Why it matters: Partners said Beaufort’s visitor economy supplies a large share of local tax revenue and jobs but also creates seasonal strain; the partners urged balancing demand generation with resident quality-of-life concerns and stepped-up investment in workforce and off-peak programming.

Quotes (selected): "Visitors represented about 36% of all cell phone data in the marketplace" — Rob Wells, president and CEO, Visit Beaufort. "Hospitality tax and accommodations tax represent about 60% of the city of Beaufort’s total general fund revenues since 2018" — Ashley Calk, Beaufort Area Hospitality Association.

Ending: Visit Beaufort and the hospitality and business chambers said they will continue shared marketing and events planning, step up data sharing with city departments, and pursue off-season programming and sports tourism to smooth demand; the chamber said it will publish updated community data at the end of February for local planning purposes.