Visit Greater Palm Springs outlines regional tourism master plan and targets $9 billion impact

Visit Greater Palm Springs presented a 2026 update to the Indian Wells City Council on Feb. 5, saying the region is recovering toward pre-pandemic travel levels and launching new planning and marketing work to sustain growth.

Scott White (introduced to the council as the Visit Greater Palm Springs presenter) said the organization contracted Hunden Partners to lead a regional tourism master plan and will add nine individual city tourism master plans to that scope, paid for by Visit GPS. "They're gonna do a a complete regional plan that will, really look at the region holistically," he said, and stressed the city-specific plans are intended to provide "ideas, benchmarking, best practices" for each community.

White described tourism as the Coachella Valley's leading industry and cited targets: "We're going after 14,000,000 visitors, 9,000,000,000 in economic impact," figures he said will be refined in an upcoming 2025 study and a planned 2026 update. He told council staff and members that Visit GPS will provide dashboards to give cities access to up-to-date data.

Colleen Pace, chief sales and marketing officer (introduced by White), highlighted research priorities including a resident-sentiment study and visitor intercept work. "Your number one item there is resident sentiment study ... to capture resident perceptions, the impact of tourism on quality of life, and the community benefit to guide responsible growth," she said, describing a mid-2026 timeline for resident outreach.

Davis Meyer, vice president of industry relations and government affairs (introduced by White), summarized 2025 convention sales and marketing results, reporting "262 plus thousand room nights booked" from 428 meetings and estimating a $238 million regional economic impact from meetings activity. He added that Indian Wells-specific group business produced an estimated $49 million economic impact for the city's properties in the period reviewed.

Council members asked how Indian Wells-specific impact is measured; White said Visit GPS uses modeling tools from Destinations International and Tourism Economics combined with local rate and room-night inputs. He also confirmed Visit GPS funding comes largely from a tourism business improvement district (about 90 percent), with roughly 8 percent contributed by valley cities, and that cities' contributions are a percentage of local transient-occupancy taxes.

The presentation closed with council members thanking Visit GPS and acknowledging planned follow-up on the resident-sentiment study and data dashboards.