Where will Outer Banks tourism be in a decade?

By Corinne Saunders | Outer Banks Voice on May 25, 2023

‘Long-Range Tourism Management Plan’ looks ahead 10 years

Lee Nettles, executive director of the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, discusses the Long-Range Tourism Management Plan on May 24. (Photo credit Corinne Saunders/OBV)

After considering global tourism trends and garnering local input, a consulting firm working with the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau presented a “Long-Range Tourism Management Plan” on the evening of May 24 at the Ramada Plaza Oceanfront in Kill Devil Hills.

The plan outlines what is characterized as a “moderate, balanced approach” to tourism.

Shelly Green, executive consultant with MMGY NextFactor, told about 50 event attendees that the company has worked on the plan for about a year.  The firm considered global tourism trends, conducted resident surveys, held two town hall meetings, conducted 15 one-on-one interviews and seven focus groups, and conducted a survey specifically for business and tourism leaders.

Green reported that Outer Banks residents and tourism leaders alike found the pandemic-related surge in tourism unsustainable, with the word “balance” surfacing repeatedly.

Paid accommodations revenue in Dare County increased 57.2% from 2019 to 2022, according to the plan’s executive summary. “In 2021, visitors to Dare County spent $1.8 billion, supporting over 12,000 jobs and $79 million of local tax revenue,” it reported.

In 10 years, according to the plan, visitor spending would be at $2.1 billion, “jobs would stabilize at about 12,087 related to the visitor economy” and the shoulder seasons would account for about 23% of Outer Banks visitation, “so it’s not all that sharp peak and decline” from the summer months to the rest of the year, said Cass McAuley, senior vice president for MMGY NextFactor.

Survey respondents shared that tourism is vital to the Outer Banks’ economy, with positive benefits outweighing the negative. However, “the local economy is too heavily dependent on tourism—that’s what we heard,” Green said. “There’s also a fear that the more tourism there is, the more traffic there is, so something needed to be done about traffic.”

“You are now the poster child for how to do a resident survey, as you had 4,500-plus people [respond]; and that’s just not numbers that we see even in much larger destinations,” Green noted of the Outer Banks. “So people care, and they wanted to tell us what they thought.”

From looking at global tourism trends and local priorities, “we came up with three transformational opportunities,” Green said. They are alignment, sustainable development and values-based marketing.

Alignment is “aligning the public, private and civic centers, so they’re all understanding and seeing the same thing,” she said. Sustainable development goes beyond environmentally friendly development—”this is how you marry people, planet, profit and policy.”

For values-based marketing, Green said, “These communities in the Outer Banks have very strong values. And using those to attract and serve visitors helps find the visitors that will value what you have—and we think that’s a really important part of this.”

The plan identifies four strategic goals to move forward:

• Strengthen resident and visitor engagement.
• Adopt an integrated approach to improving environmental stewardship.
• Support infrastructure development that benefits the vitality of the community for residents and visitors.
• Collaborate and advocate for an increase in housing diversity for all residents.

The first point includes steps such as encouraging visitors to continue partnering with local nonprofits, investing in “voluntourism,” creating a resident advisory council, hiring a “community engagement manager,” and creating a “visitor pledge” for respectful treatment of the area, McAuley noted.

The second goal is “so we aren’t loving a place to death,” she said. “We heard so much about traffic, and we’re seeing it tonight. So how do we get around?” She referenced the presentation start time, which was delayed 10 minutes because several attendees were stuck in traffic on their way to the Ramada.

The third goal would involve undertaking a density study, improving accessibility around the Outer Banks for residents and visitors and supporting initiatives like pedestrian safety, while the fourth goal means advocating for and working toward “alternative and more sustainable housing,” she said.

During the question-and-answer session following the presentation, a man noted that the Outer Banks area includes more than six municipalities and asked if the firm had worked in other areas with a “similar situation.”

“We do have a lot of experience in multi-jurisdictional areas,” McAuley responded.

Lee Nettles, Executive Director of the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, added that the work here is not starting from the ground floor, given how the tourism board includes representatives from each town, the county, the chamber of commerce, tourism and at-large members.

“Just by the nature of the composition of the board, we’ve already had years of working together and kind of understanding and leveraging those differences and working toward common goals,” Nettles said. “So it puts us in a good position to kind of start this next loop and these next initiatives.”

A woman in attendance asked how plan initiatives typically get funded, and McAuley said, “The funding for these initiatives is going to come from many different sources, and collectively, we need to think about that.”

Nettles said in his remarks before the presentation that COVID brought a vision of the future and that, much like Ebenezer Scrooge’s change of heart after visits with the three ghosts in “A Christmas Carol,” the community can change course.

“I feel like we’ve closed the gap between the tourism industry and the locals in a way that hasn’t been done since I’ve been here, and we want to keep that going,” Nettles told the Voice after the meeting.

“The residents’ advisory council, I think, is going to be a big first step…[and] hiring the community engagement manager is another big first step,” he said. “At this point, we’ll go into the June meeting of the tourism board and…have a couple of immediate items we can move on and start prioritizing some of the other activities.”

Tim Cafferty, chairman of the Dare County Tourism Board of Directors, said the data and survey results revealed through the planning process came as no surprise.

“Things I see as a business owner day-to-day came out in spades on this report,” he said. “I’m just very interested as a business owner [in] what can I do to help? And what can others in the role in other places do to help? Because I think the industry has to step up here and go to work.”

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