Gaston County Community Tourism Action Plans & Project Evaluations

About the Program

Category: Community and Economic Development (Best in Category)

Year: 2023

County-wide our destination has seen recent hotel supply additions in Belmont, Gastonia, and Mount Holly, and with that, improved occupancy tax revenue for the county and each of these municipal Tourism Development Authorities. We all agree that to best support our mutual accommodations business owners, we need to continually provide a robust pace of hotel guest room demand in proportion to this growing inventory. We also understand that to accomplish this task, the experiences offered throughout our jurisdictions to out-of-town visitors must continue to evolve. An important part of this evolution is the creation of new demand drivers, whether promotional programs or brick and mortar attractors. The new revenues derived from recent hotel construction post 2019, and subsequent occupancy tax revenue growth, provide us with a funding resource for any potential future tourism related infrastructure investment. In developing these customized, individual Community Tourism Action Plans in collaboration among County and Municipal stakeholders, we identified shared priorities for potential tourism demand driver projects and ensured a common commitment to the prioritized projects’ successful completion. The Community Tourism Action Plan outlines an agreed-upon strategy, and the Project Evaluation Tool provides an agreed-upon funding model, based upon new revenue growth, to bring the tourism-related guest experiential changes envisioned to fruition.