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Visit McDonough outlines marketing push, FIFA landing page and visitor tracking
Summary
The city’s tourism director told the City Council Visit McDonough is focusing ad dollars on digital billboards and targeted campaigns, launched a Welcome Center log to capture visitor origins and emails, and has a FIFA 2026 landing page to promote local merchants.
Visit McDonough’s director, Jasmine Granger, briefed the City Council on April 2 about how the city is promoting itself ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and year-round travel. Granger said the tourism board is the city’s destination marketing organization and that its primary goal is to attract travelers to stay in McDonough hotels.
The presentation explained how Georgia’s hotel-motel tax is distributed: 8 pennies per $1 of the tax, with 3.5 pennies allocated to tourism promotion (TCT), 1.5 pennies to tourism product development (TPD) for physical attractions, and 3 pennies to the city’s general fund. “These funds are restricted,” Granger said, adding that TCT funding is limited to promotion and advertising while TPD can support visitor centers, wayfinding and physical attractions.
Granger said roughly 75% of the tourism budget goes to advertising — digital billboards, print, and online campaigns — and pointed to analytics the board uses to track where visitors originate and what they search for. She highlighted a new Welcome Center sign-in log, intended to distinguish local from out-of-town visitors and to collect emails for follow-up marketing. “We’ve encouraged the Welcome Center staff to invite every guest to sign in,” she said.
Council members pressed Granger about hotel occupancy trends. She acknowledged a decline in occupancy over the past three years and attributed part of that to fewer local tournaments and event cancellations: “The trend has shown that the occupancy has decreased in the past 3 years…a lot of that…we’ll have people block rooms for a tournament…they cancel their reservations.” Council members suggested closer coordination with Main Street on printed materials and asked whether the city could link tourism content into the city’s new McDonough Pulse app; Granger said staff would coordinate with the city’s communications director.
On FIFA preparations, Granger said Visit McDonough created a dedicated landing page and plans social media promotion and short video spots featuring the mayor to welcome visitors. She emphasized the board cannot fund events or fireworks with tourism-restricted dollars, but can promote merchants’ special offerings on its channels. The council asked staff to continue coordination and to bring any policy or partnership needs back to the governing body.
The council did not take a formal vote on tourism funding during the meeting. The presentation concluded with council members and hotel representatives describing opportunities to improve park facilities and local attractions to better capture overnight stays.
