Maryville Tourism Committee reviews action items, timeline

The Maryville Tourism Committee met January 23 to review Tourism Director DeAnn Davison’s action items and timeline on tourism’s key initiatives.

Davison lined up the year-one priorities including staffing, funding, grant opportunities, defining tourism and how Maryville tourism works within it, host an introductory stakeholder summit, lodging partner check-ins, establish stakeholder communications, capitalize on university events, partner with university and local industries for extended-stays, and ongoing tracking and transparent reporting.

Davison estimates it will take a year to work on creating a full-time Maryville tourism director position and increasing funding for the tourism initiative. The funding includes a tourism committee member, city of Maryville representative and Nodaway County commissioner meeting to determine the feasibility of the county contributing to the tourism budget. A plan to add county representation to the tourism committee if needed is a possibility.

Discussion was held on following up if local Airbnbs and short-term rentals are paying in the bed tax.

Davison is planning to apply for the marketing platform development grant and marketing matching grant through the Missouri Division of Tourism. She is also planning to pursue other grant opportunities.

An introductory stakeholder meeting will be held in June. Committee member Josh McKim said the meeting would need to cover initiatives:

• Build a tourism culture within the stakeholder community;

• Focus marketing to bring back guests and attract new ones;

• Partnership and packaging with existing assets to create short-term new products; and

• Tracking and reporting the measurement of success. He said the main question to answer for the stakeholders is “How is this going to impact their bottom line.”

The next tourism committee meeting will be in March.