Composite of various images from Visit Lubbock website
Lubbock has nearly 7 million visitors every year – not quite double from 2010 and there’s good reason to think the number will go up again soon.
Is it time to build a freestanding visitor’s center?
“There’s no way that a town of 300,000 people could support as many restaurants and places to shop as we have here in our community,” said John Osborne, president and CEO of the Lubbock Economic Development Alliance (LEDA) and Market Lubbock Inc.
Visitors are a big reason we can have nice things.
Some visitors stay in a hotel. Others only drive in from West Texas or Eastern New Mexico and go home the same day. Nearly all of them spend money here.
“They spend the night. They definitely shop … in our shops and then eat in our restaurants which is what makes it possible for you and me to enjoy these restaurants and shops,” Osborne said.
Visit Lubbock (which operates within Market Lubbock Inc.) is the city’s tourism bureau. Visit Lubbock has more than $5 million in the current budget for capital projects like ball fields.
Maybe a visitor center?
Abilene started a visitor center 24 years ago, according to Robert Lopez, vice president of the Abilene Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Visitors might become students at a local university like Texas Tech or employees with a local company.
“It always starts with the visit,” Lopez said.
Lubbock has a visitor center, but you can’t see it driving down the street. It’s on the sixth floor of the McDougal Building, 1500 Broadway.
Most of the work to promote Lubbock is done online but Osborne wonders if it’s time to change that.
Current promotion
“Right now, we do sell Lubbock trinkets,” Osborne said.
A search for the term “Lubbock visitor center” on Google brings up Visit Lubbock. Poke around long enough and you’ll find a link to Lubbock Store.
There’s a miniature cotton bale for $8. A fridge magnet with a cowboy-hat-wearing prairie dog will run you $2. There’s even one of those squishy things called a ‘stress reliever.’ That’ll be $6 and you can add those things to your virtual shopping cart.
But it’s not obvious you can pick one up in person at Visit Lubbock on Broadway.
“So, we would move that,” Osborne said.
“I think there’s an opportunity to partner with our local artists to have some of their items being displayed,” he said.
Planning, not doing – not yet
This is still early in the process.
“All we’ve decided is we need to think through this and start to look. Is there a way to do a visitor center that is not too expensive?” Osborne said.
Leasing is better than buying or constructing, he said. Hard to say what size it would be.
“We’re not talking about trying to build the Taj Mahal here … Enough space to really promote the community,” Osborne said.
Brochures and a place to sell little Lubbocky things.
Osborne told the council it could go downtown near some new developments. But now that Loop 88 is under construction on Lubbock’s south and west side, add that to the list of possible locations. He mentioned Interstate 27 too when speaking with LubbockLights.com.
There was a time when downtown would not have been an option. Now it is.
“We’ve kind of tossed it around once or twice over the last decade, but downtown was not in the right state,” Osborne said. New growth in hotel space downtown makes a difference.
The money for a visitor center would come from hotel fees. Osborne thinks the place might be open from 9 or 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. or “something like that.”
When will it get going?
“I don’t have a deadline,” he said.
Greater need
Lubbock has roughly 7,000 hotel rooms available on any given night.
“The total lodging revenue for hotels was more than $13 million,” Osborne said, which was just for the month of June.
“There’s people that are then eating out after shopping and so there’s just a lot of additional revenues that come in with this,” Osborne said to Lubbock Lights.
In June, he told the City Council about local hotels saying, “They’re sitting above 60 percent occupancy, and that’s getting noticed by a lot of outside hoteliers.”
“The last time we were at this kind of level of hotel occupancy, it created a real boom in new building of hotels – which then increased our number of visitors,” he told the Council.
That good?
“There’s a lot of positive things taking place in our community,” Osborne said.
A recent example he cited was the American Jr. Golf Association hosting an all-star event at the Rawls Course at Texas Tech. It brought in players from China, Japan, Australia, California and other places. There were 94 participants and only two of them were local, Osborne said.
In April, the 2024 USA Gymnastics Region 3 Championships came to Lubbock bringing participants from multiple states.
Research by the governor’s office showed one of the biggest attractions for Lubbock was (brace yourself) Prairie Dog Town.
“Some locals think that that’s not necessarily the best thing to come and enjoy. There are a lot of people that find it intriguing,” Osborne said.
Visit Lubbock recruits big events related to 20 or more different sports. It also tries to attract events to more than 70 different businesses or event centers listed on its website.
If it does it a great job
Lopez said, “Visitor centers serve an excellent purpose. The first thing we do is ask them questions. ‘Hey, where are you from?’ And, ‘What brings you to town?’”
If information is power, then those answers give the center power to sell a visitor on bigger and better experiences.
It helps both the city and the visitors.
“They’ll spend a little bit more money and they’ll have a memorable experience and then want to return again,” Lopez said.
LubbockLights.com asked Lopez how a city can tell if the visitor center is a good return on investment.
“I think you can’t just look at the visitor center itself. … I think you have to look at it as, ‘What is the return on investment as far as tourism as a whole?’”
He described it in terms of building a relationship. Ask the visitor questions. Give answers that make a more enjoyable stay.
His advice to any city is; don’t let a visitor center get sidetracked with multiple missions. Stick to one thing only.
“Centers are a great thing as long as they’re used solely as a tool to enhance the visitors’ experience and no other purpose,” Lopez said.
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