Visit South Bend/Mishawaka embarks on 10-year plan to develop local tourism

Those concerned with promoting tourism in St. Joseph County are taking steps to ensure that available money is being devoted in the right areas to attract overnight visitors.

The St. Joseph County Hotel-Motel Tax Board and Visit South Bend/Mishawaka have launched a study that will get underway in earnest Feb. 27 and will ultimately make recommendations on tourism spending over the next 10 years.

CSL International, a firm that provides planning and advisory services for sports, venues, entertainment and tourism, will be paid $151,000 to conduct meetings with a wide range of about 140 community stakeholders and ultimately produce a plan this summer.

Beyond the meetings with stakeholders, the entire community also will have the opportunity to share their tourism ideas via an online questionnaire that will be available in March, Visit South Bend/Mishawaka Executive Director Jeff Jarnecke said.

The Hotel-Motel Tax Board disburses about $9.6 million a year that is generated from the 8% tax that visitors pay when they’re spending a night in a hotel or a rental through Airbnb or Vrbo.

Of the total, or roughly $1.2 million is divided evenly between Potawatomi Zoo and the Morris Performing Arts Center for upgrades to both venues. Roughly the same amount goes to the Mishawaka Fieldhouse project, which is expected to open this summer near Juday Creek north of Douglas Road.

Summer completion: Mishawaka Fieldhouse on schedule to change the athletic and economic landscape locally

Another $1.2 million of the tax is used at the discretion of the Hotel-Motel Tax Board and the tourism organization to provide occasional support for projects such as the dinosaur museum and chocolate factory complex that Mark Tarner, president of the South Bend Chocolate Co., plans to open in the coming months near the airport.

Jarnecke said the remaining roughly $6 million a year is used to support the efforts of Visit South Bend/Mishawaka to promote tourism in the area and provide at least $2 million a year to offset the cost of Century Center in downtown South Bend.

Besides collecting ideas from the community, CSL also will look at the effectiveness of current spending when it comes to promoting tourism and benchmark the area against other similar-sized communities.

“We need some strategic thinking from a cross section of the community to how to get our best return on tourism investments,” said John Anthony, who serves as president of the Tax Board and operates Anthony Travel. “We’ve never had the opportunity to invest like this before. So, let’s be smart and strategic.”

Coming attraction: Mark Tarner's dinosaur and chocolate complex near the South Bend airport on target

After hitting a record 980,000 room nights in 2022, overnight stays dropped 7% to 911,000 in 2023, Jarnecke said, while pointing out that the entire state was down 1% in 2023 and surrounding counties were down even more than St. Joseph County.

Prior to the pandemic in 2019, the county had 967,000 overnight stays, so tourism officials want to make sure that future tourism spending is aimed at maximizing overnight stays because visitors spent an estimated $1.2 billion here in 2023, Jarnecke said.

The long-range plan is the first ever for the county’s tourism effort, but the organization didn’t have the benefit of the additional money from a 2-percentage-point boost in the bed tax until October 2021.

In 2022, it made its first award of $1 million to help the Ice Box Skating Rink on a multi-million-dollar project to develop a third sheet of ice and make other upgrades to the complex on the south side of South Bend.

Since the opening of the Compton Family Ice Arena at the University of Notre Dame, the area has been successful in attracting youth hockey tournaments from across the country, resulting in considerable room nights and visitor spending in the winter months, when business typically falls off.

“Having a fifth ice rink would make the area really stand out,” Jarnecke said, adding that youth hockey is already by far the area’s leading youth sports success generating more than 26,000 room nights in 2023 alone.

And with the addition of the $38 million Mishawaka Fieldhouse this summer, an additional 30 to 40 tournaments could come to the area because the facility will include 10 multi-use indoor courts for basketball or volleyball, two turf fields and a pickleball court, according to officials.

John Phair, a long-time developer who now focuses mostly on Holladay Hospitality Group hotels, is serving on the study steering committee and hopes the project can identify the best places to invest resources that produce overnight stays.

“The pandemic hit and everything changed,” he said. “Business traffic is down everywhere, and leisure has not made up for the gap.”

Phair said he’s most enthused about the possibilities of the chocolate factory and dinosaur museum that’s being built near the airport and the addition of new amateur sports facilities when it comes to bringing in overnight visitors.

The long-range tourism study, which is a first for the community, will look at those projects and other existing assets while also considering other ideas that could provide growth in the future.

“The hope would be that we end up with a unifying vision throughout the county,” Jarnecke said. “That would allow us to put all available resources to their best use.”

Email Tribune staff writer Ed Semmler at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Visit South Bend/Mishawaka developing 10-year plan to build tourism