CHARLESTON, W.Va. — State Tourism Secretary Chelsea Ruby says West Virginia’s tourism only continues to grow as they take a look back at its most recent successes.
Ruby gave the Department of Tourism’s budget presentation for Fiscal Year 2025 before the West Virginia Senate Finance Committee Wednesday.
She said today in West Virginia, the total economic impact in tourism is approaching $9 billion.
“Tourism in West Virginia is not a small thing anymore, it’s big business and it’s certainly something we should be looking at for the future,” Ruby said.
She said the industry generates just over a billion dollars in tax revenue, and supports around 60,000 jobs, of which, are paying over $2 billion in wages.
Ruby said tourism was on a decline in West Virginia when she first came into the office back in 2017, but it slowly started to pick back up.
“So, tourism was on the decline, we weren’t able to keep up with our neighboring states, we were simply being outspent,” she said. “Then you can see this drastic increase here, which shows in 2017 when we started increasing the funding for tourism, changing the traditional strategies, and ever since then with the dip from Covid, we”ve had a very, very positive line here.”
Ruby said one of the primary items they look at is Direct Traveler’s Spending, or direct dollars that reflect how much visitors are spending when they come to the state.
She said they compare how visitor spending is doing in West Virginia and at nationwide levels to pre-Covid-19 Pandemic numbers of 2019.
In West Virginia, raw visitor spending has grown to 23% from 2019, Ruby said,, and comparing that to the U.S. as a whole, overall tourism spending in the U.S. has only grown to 9%.
So, what is the state’s Department of Tourism doing with the funds coming in through tourism? Ruby asked. She said the main portion goes directly back into the effort through advertising.
Ruby said they are primarily advertising in places that are four to five hours drive from West Virginia, however, they have further expanded ads to New York, and Orlando and Tampa, Florida, places of which direct flights out of West Virginia are offered to.
Additionally, she said they expanded their media across the country targeting niche markets.
Ruby said their latest endeavor is advertising to international markets so they can grow the number of international visitors coming to the Mountain State.
“If you look at the states around us, many of them are growing by leaps and bounds when it comes to international visitation,” she said. “Those international visitors, they’re going to stay two to three weeks and they’re going to visit four to five states, our goal is to get on their road trip schedule, so we’re also working and drawing down some federal funding to help supplement our budget and increase our international reach.”
Ruby said they always look at their top-performing digital ads, and no matter what season, they have found that ads featuring a state waterfall consistently gets the most traction and clicks.
Because of this, she said they wanted to find a way to capitalize on this and in 2020, they introduced the statewide Waterfall Trail, which Ruby said has completely reemphasized visitor’s demand for that particular natural attraction due to how big of a hit it has become.
“I’m very, very proud with how well this trail has done, we initially launched it as an in-state initiative and it quickly gained popularity,” Ruby said. “As of today, we have had more than 100,000 checks ins at our 43 waterfalls in the state, and we have had visitors from all 50 states and 44 countries.”
Ruby said because of the success of the Waterfall Trail, they opened another statewide trail for the fall that encompasses all of the spooky, historical sites the state has to offer known as the Paranormal Trail. She said this trail has already received about 7,000 check-ins since its launch.
She said another major success has been the West Virginia wooden swings placed around the state for photo-ops. These were built and designed by students from the Nicholas County Community and Technical Center, and Ruby said they hope to spread them around to all 55 counties.
Ruby said an area that could use some improving, however, is workforce development in the tourism industry, but they are currently looking at ways they can expand education for this workforce industry.
“We aren’t getting enough people in this industry to keep up with the growth we are getting,” Ruby said. “So, during the pandemic, each state tourism office was given an allotment of funds to help recover from the pandemic, and instead of spending those dollars on marketing, we actually allocated them to be used for workforce development in the future, we’re still working through those funds, we have another year left in this grant.”
She said tourism education is now a part of many school’s curriculum in the state and they have four newly expanded programs at state CTC schools.
Finally, Ruby said their last major focus has been in increasing their online presence and public relations.
She said they continue to see growth in website traffic with more than 4 million visitors last year, and about 200,000 vacation guide requests.
Ruby said when it comes to PR, it’s not always about just measuring advertising impressions, but it’s about changing the way people think about West Virginia.
She said when her office came in 2017, one of the goals was to get major travel publications to start paying attention to West Virginia.
Ruby said all of these travel publications include lists such as “Top 10 Places to Go,” or “Top 5 Places for Your Bucket List,” and it was West Virginia’s goal to get on one of these lists, which she said they have finally achieved.
“We would always submit stuff, West Virginia was always in the running, but we weren’t getting picked,” she said. “That’s really changed over the last few years when we started hosting these writers, we started taking them to places throughout your districts and around the state to really get them acquainted with the state and let them see for themselves, since then, we’ve received a number of accolades, those continue to mount.”
Ruby concluded her presentation by adding that tourism projects only continue to come in thanks to investments in the industry, and she’s excited what this fiscal year will bring for tourism.