Daniel Guttentag, director of the college's Office of Tourism Analysis, presents 2024 data during the city's tourism forum May 20.
It's been a decade since Charleston's last tourism management plan was modified and officials say it's due to for an update.
In that time, the influx has grown into a $14 billion industry that welcomes 7.8 million visitors.
Bloomberg Associates, which is part of billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's philanthropic arm, is the firm that will help chart the course forward.
Project leaders from the firm attended a forum May 20 at the Charleston Museum with more than 130 attendees to discuss the state of tourism in the city and what unique challenges and benefits the industry has on the community. The future of the city's hotel and hospitality policies are being weighed by city officials as they look at their tourism and peninsula-wide plans amid growing development pressure.
This isn't the first time Bloomberg Associates has sought to address growth issues in Charleston. Last year, the research group worked with the city to set goals to help drive down the cost of housing and slow sprawl. The report was published in December, finding that the city could risk losing its workforce if it doesn't shift away from single-family homes dominating the market.
Now it's honing its research focus on how to better manage tourism and livability on the peninsula.
The initiative is being led by the city, Historic Charleston Foundation and Explore Charleston. The May 20 forum included presentations from Mayor William Cogswell, the College of Charleston's Office of Tourism Analysis, and Bloomberg's experts on tourism.
Cogswell said he's confident Bloomberg's data, analysis and marketing expertise will help the city find "a healthy balance between the visitors' experience and those of us that live here."
While Cogswell recognized tourism's enormous benefits in terms of economic impact and tax revenue that help fund the city's budget, he said he also realizes it sometimes has less desirable nuisances for residents like "influencers in your driveway, a bachelorette party singing at 3 a.m. and buses not meant for 18th century streets."
Cogswell's three tourism priorities are to move forward with a residents-first mindset, expand the tourism footprint beyond downtown and focus on attracting higher-spending visitors, he said.
The latter of that list has been something Charleston is already doing. Daniel Guttentag, director of the college's Office of Tourism Analysis, said the recent economic impact report compiled for the city showed the trend that the economic output of tourism outpaces the number of new visitors per year.
Tourism's economic impact has jumped by 45 percent since 2019, with the number of visitors increasing by 6 percent in that time.
Bloomberg speakers gave some insight into past projects they've worked on and how they might relate to Charleston. They worked with cities like Ashville, N.C., on regulating hotel development; Columbus, Ohio, on smart mobility hubs; Flanders in Belgium on how to attract high-value visitors; and Amsterdam in the Netherlands to curb nuisance behaviors of tourists.
George Fertitta, CEO of Bloomberg Associates, said Charleston will be a challenge. The difficulties they've encountered in other cities usually stemmed from lack of a tourism management and marketing agency, underfunding or lack of strategy, but "Charleston has none of these problems."
Over the past 11 years, the firm has worked pro bono with 22 cities worldwide, from Paris, Milan and Chicago to Mexico City. In some cases, the firm has spent up to 10,000 hours working through data per city, according to Bloomberg.
Fertitta said many cities would love to be in Charleston's place, having the assets to be a tourism market, having an unparalleled brand personality and the foresight to plan ahead.
"Our team at Bloomberg Associates has been asked to provide outside perspective, new eyes and ears, to try to help Charleston navigate and maintain the balance of your tourism and your growth success into the future," Fertitta said. "In a way, it's a more difficult assignment because it's much more nuanced and perhaps more emotional than just fixing a problem or changing a direction."
Winslow Hastie, from the Historic Charleston Foundation, called the study a "pulse check" on tourism's impact on residents. He said the work done to preserve history is the reason why tourists come here to feel like locals, but the answer needs to be centered around residents.
"A major challenge of our tourism economy is that the lion's share of our visitors are concentrated in a very small part of our city downtown," Hastie said. "People are primarily coming to Charleston to see our historic neighborhoods and private houses -- places where locals live, work and go about their daily lives. We don't have major landmarks, cathedrals, or other major public facilities like a lot of other cities. It is the wonderfully preserved collection of buildings that are the draw."
The city will soon create a website for Charleston-area residents to submit comments for Bloomberg's research.
Bloomberg officials will return in the fall with more data and recommendations that Charleston officials can use to update the city's strategic plan for responsible tourism management policies.