Convention and Visitors Advisory - Regular Meeting

All right, good morning again. Any public comments?

Andy Hancock, local business owner, 25 years on South Padre. I'm looking forward to the discussions later on coming up with a marketing strategy. One thing that seems to be, that concerns me that's on this, and I may have got this wrong, but the presentation seems to be trying to roll a strategy into our long-term vision for South Padre, the island way. I'm so old, I was around for the last comprehensive plan. and our record on achievement for that is questionable. But rolling a strategy into an island way which is a vision document for the island, that's a vision document that says what we'd like to achieve long-term and and some of the really big stuff we wanna get done. A strategy, a marketing strategy especially, needs to be based on current metrics, current results, and obviously in the technological age we live in, those are easily collectible and put together these days, so we can adjust a strategy annually and have it really laser focused on what we're trying to do. So rolling it into the island way and making it some sort of five-year thing where we're going to do this for five years and see how it goes, that just concerns me greatly. I think we're not responding to what's happening to the island now, what's happening in Brownsville and the ports and LNG and all the other stuff. We're not responding to what we're doing and we're also not using the latest metrics because we still singularly reviews to seem to want to put them up. I don't know why. Also, a strategy has to respond to the results we actually get. So, it's using the latest results which can be collated easily. You can then move forward on an annual basis with your strategy and focus it on what's getting you results and what isn't. but we don't seem to have that system in place. We have no strategy. We have the island way which is a vision document, that's nothing to do with strategy, that's long-term goal planning. So, I'm looking forward to the discussion later on producing a strategy because with respect, the last however many CBB directors have singularly never managed to do that. So, but I think it's short-sighted and in my opinion, short-sighted to roll any sort of strategy into a vision document because those are two completely separate things and we need focused attention, a focused marketing strategy, annually reported and annually designed based on the results, success, and non-success we have after each year, and then refocus and then move forward, which can easily be done with technology we have available today. So, thank you. Thank you.

Any other public comments? Hearing none, move to item four, approved consent agenda. Is there a motion?

Motion to approve consent agenda.

All right, discussion? Hearing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Okay, 5-1, presentation by Greenhouse regarding the Visit South Potter Island Summer 2026 Campaign Recap. Good morning.

Hi, good morning. Cindy Trevino, Chief Marketing Officer. I have Casey and the team from Greenhouse to give a recap on how successful our summer was. Great. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, Casey, we can. Can you hear us okay?

Absolutely. Very good. Thank you. Let me go ahead and share my screen here. I'll move into the larger view. Okay, we'll run through the program highlights, overview of what we're trying to accomplish and obviously answer any questions you have along the way. As we know, we've already made a lot of modifications building for this next year. So we've tried to apply a lot of that to learnings and improving performance based on what we've seen this summer and prior to. So the program that we're going to review today is April through August. So the launch of summer all the way through and it's going to review all elements that we ran from our content program to what we're doing with our OTA partnerships to what we're doing to generate awareness to search and basically everything in between. So in total, we had just shy of 80 million impressions in the marketplace, which is really, really strong. And that resulted in a massive amount of clicks. And you'll see from later in the deck that a lot of that came from some of our mid-to-bottle funnel tactics like search and social. But overall, we saw tremendous engagement at every level of the program that signaled people were responding to the creative. They found it interesting. interesting intriguing and so we were generating a lot of positive engagement from that so 574 000 clicks our click-through rate across the board was really good blended at 0.73 percent and our spend for the program was just under 700 000 invested in the summer months so within that at a high level again i'll go through more detail later the ota partnership Again, it's designed to get in front of travelers. So that's the first and foremost, it's quality impressions in front of travelers. But we also track when they're exposed to the ad unit, what do they ultimately do? And out of that, it translated into 24,000 roommates across Expedia, Booking.com, Priceline, Hopper, and TripAdvisor, and 7.8 million in revenue across those platforms. The Google search program had a massive 13, almost 14% click through rate. We did a pretty strong layered content program featuring Texas Monthly, where we integrated there organically. A program with, I totally blanked with TripAdvisor, pardon me, and another program with Eater, really showcasing everything that's possible to be done. And South Padre Island during summer and trying to paint a different picture for what we're showcasing to travelers. Then on top of that, targeting travelers, we layered in a strong CTV program, paired that with digital out of home and audio. When we ran those programs, we saw about 16 million impressions and everyone was really completing those units. They were staying through. which is, I know that it's not the strongest metric, right? It's hard to evaluate, but it's the closest that we can get to an indicator of finding it relevant. So a 92% completion rate is well above benchmark and really strong for the industry. Then we had our foundational program where we're targeting all the different pillars from birding to fishing to outdoor, and we'll have some nuance there, but generally they all perform really well. And then we layered in social and TikTok really jumped out there for us. So key learnings at a high level, video is a big driver of awareness. So in total, across both college and family, college being late spring and then moving into family and General Beach for summer, we saw 98% completion rate across the board. We integrated our program into live events. And so we were pulling in our spot was running in MLB into NBA playoffs and all live streaming and sports events that we could manage over the summer months to try to be in that more premium window and space and it worked really well. When it comes to audio, the younger segments and when we look at the younger segments, it had a much lower completion rate. So we've started to optimize away from that now and then into next year. They didn't find it as engaging when we're putting a spot on a Spotify or Pandora, but the older audiences did find it more engaging and had a much higher completion rate. From our pillar programs, that's running across everything, Google, and it's a heavy retargeting program. We had really strong results, to be honest. Birding and fishing were the top drivers, huge click-through rate there. The weirdness is across the board, the click-through is really strong, but the marine and family assets that we ran against those specific targets actually had a really low click-through rate. so we were first alarmed like what do we do should we optimize away from that but then when you look at what they're doing on site they had the highest on-site engagement time spent conversion rate so it was a little bit of a balance once we got them there they found the content perfect um but they were harder to motivate so it's some message testing to be done and maybe some visuals that we can rotate in to see but ultimately this program performed well for a modest investment The content program, we have some examples to show later in the deck. TripAdvisor, that program. So we built content specifically around things to do in summer or family on the heels of the sweepstakes. So the sweepstakes didn't carry over, but the momentum that we create on TripAdvisor did. And then we had all that content in market. And on their site, not just what translates to the Visit South Padre site, but on their site, they got 108,000 page views to that content that they created in just under a minute time on site. So we felt like that's a really good level of engagement and interest for the content that's created by a third party. We still got good engagement from Thrillist slash Eater, 16,000 page views, about the same time on site, a little bit less. And then Texas Monthly, obviously more niche, smaller audience there, but very, very qualified. And so we saw 5,000 page views there. So collectively about 130,000 page views, in addition to all the impressions and engagement that they created outside of that. So we felt like it was a really good way to show people how to engage and what they can do in South Padre and get them excited. And then the OTAs at that bottom funnel really just intended to work hard and drive room nights for people that are interested, or at least get in front of those people that are interested and push them to make that decision. So like I said before, almost 8 million in aggregate bookings, almost 7 million impressions. So fairly strong return and a good click-through rate to attach to it. I'll go real fast here. Our target audiences. So we had a family traveler. So that was the bulk of what we're doing here. A general beach traveler that can have some overlap to family. Just that person that is seeking a beach vacation by all the searches and behaviors that we can see. The general traveling tender, the person that's just searching for South Padre or a competitor on an OTA. So we're trying to get in front of them just to stay top of minds. And then in total for this, we had about 28 million in our target markets that we're going after. I've talked so much about this already. So again, I'll breeze through this, but the approach, a TripAdvisor content hub, full media plan, trying to drive engagement with that, all with the intention of giving that third-party validation and excitement for what can be done Same with Thrillist, much lower commitment there, but a custom article highlighting everything about South Padre Island in the summer. Again, trying to get some off the beaten path, some interesting, some different, and really get in front of someone to get them thinking and planning for what's coming. We had an interactive quiz with Texas Monthly in addition to that branded travel guide that we talked about. Compass had our CTV, which was across all the premium platforms like the Hulus and ABCs and ESPN and all of that stuff. And then paired that with audio and digital out of home with the audio primarily running Pandora, Spotify, iHeart. We layered in YouTube and TikTok and then OTA like we talked about. The content program in total had 16.5 million impressions. The quiz was one of our best engaging assets with Texas Monthly in total 184,000 clicks, which is really huge on that number of impressions. So 1% plus click-through rate on our content program is really massive. And then when TripAdvisor tracked the content that they delivered against people that ultimately booked for South Padre, they're showing a correlation and they're a pretty strong lift. So 14 to one return on ad spend, which we think is strong for something that's not really a bottom funnel program, which is really more about awareness for the destination. Here's just a high level look at the assets and we'll send all of this so you have it in detail, but how all the content came to play. So we built content hubs. We distributed the ads on social media. We distributed the ads across the partner sites and everything was trying to get people excited about coming to the island for summer. the core media programs outside of content. So this is really everything else that we ran outside of OTAs. So there's the really like engagement awareness focused media, 55 million impressions, a lot of CTV, digital out of home, audio, Obviously, we're moving a little bit away from digital home and audio in this space moving forward, and I think that's fair. But we did see really strong engagement across the board. So CTV, again, as I mentioned, we had a 98% completion rate as a whole. Some of that dropped depending on the younger audience that we talked about, but still very, very strong. Speaks to the creative, it speaks to the interest of the destination and the targeting. um google and google everything google search and performance max really function as that bottom level foundation of the whole plan carried a lot of weight for a relatively modest investment huge click-through rate a lot of activity a lot of clicks the primary amount of clicks came from that layer of the program on just a small amount of impressions, 485,000. So a really strong, heavy lifter there for us. And then TikTok also delivered a ton of engagement here. A lot of clicks, a lot of video engagement, higher than what we would typically see in that platform.

Casey? Yes. Google's doing really well. What's up with that?

I think it's been pretty consistently great for us. I think the way that we're buying it and pairing it with the content on the website, it's exactly what people are looking for. And the way that it's optimizing now is just finding more people that are that are interested in the destination and so it continues to really be a slam dunk in terms of how much time these people are spending on site how much how many visitors we're getting for relatively low investment so yeah you're right it's it's been crushing it for us and it speaks to all the great content on the site and and essentially they're they're searching for answers and we're showing them the answers they want and so it's been a it's been a really good pairing

Is there a lot of work going on with the, what's the term? It's not- AI. With the AI integration, there's the, I forget what it's called now. Your SEO, your search engine optimization versus the- All your optimization throughout the AI, yeah, for sure.

Our teams are adjusting this on a daily basis, taking words in and out. adjusting copy and messaging to try to refine it. And the system, obviously Google is, you know, a little bit voodoo, a little bit magic. So it's obviously optimizing like crazy. So as it's seeing patterns and finding people that are doing what we want, it's then able to optimize and find more of them. So the longer the programs in market, the more strength it's going to get. But yeah, you're right. There's definitely a ton of lift from Rachel, Kim, and team making sure that we're constantly refining that. Thank you.

I've got a few questions. I'm sorry, Chrissy, Chad Hart here. I saw 70 million impressions, of course, that's a ton. We've got somewhere between 2.6 million and 3.3 million in the summer for June, July, and August. Just kind of asking for some input on that. How do we track those impressions? I'm sure we're just coming back on the numbers that our advertising partners are providing, but huge, huge impression numbers. A lot of people saw us. The next question, I'm just going to kind of rattle these off, is I'd like to see, because when I see our marketing mix or advertising mix for the summer, we've got these markets by tier, and I think I brought this up before. We've got our drive markets, tier one, tier two, tier three, but I'm from the Lake Superior region of Wisconsin. When I see Midwest for our summer marketing mix, I'm gonna continue to question this, because I feel that as a city, we waste money on some markets sometimes. And the only time to not come to a beach in the south, or Mexico as an example, if you live in Wisconsin, would be in June, July, and August, because it's the only time it's not freezing cold there, right? So I think I'd like to track back and see, okay, well, where did our travelers come from in June, July, and August? And that doesn't mean we don't try new markets, but It's just kind of a long shot when I see some of these markets like, oh, we're going to advertise in Minnesota. Well, yeah, there's people here from Minnesota, but that's really a winter market in winter Texans. June, July, and August, I can tell you, being from that area, it's the furthest thing from their mind is coming to South Texas. Some countries don't operate flights. They have to drive 24 hours to get here, unless they took American United, of course, with the change of planes. So I don't know what percentage of our spend is on this Midwest market. some of these are viable like i don't know if oklahoma is considered midwest it's definitely viable arkansas new mexico these are shoulder states to us the drive makes sense right but on these fly-in markets i just kind of got to question that that's really a viable spin i don't know how much this is but i really like to see a track back well who came here like we definitely know that x the percentage are from texas We do have to stretch out somewhat, but some of these, I think, are just too big of a stretch. I don't know what money it is being spent in Indiana to get them here in the summer. I can tell you from my rental agency, that number would be zero. I didn't have any travelers from the majority of these third-tier markets in the summer. Winter's a totally different ballgame, but if we're marking this in the summer, I'm going to address that. Also, I'm assuming with Expedia and TripAdvisor, when Expedia is showing 119 times return on our advertising spend. They're kind of like just any booking that came through Expedia. They're probably counting as like, oh, that was because of your ad spend. Because if that's the case, if we have 119 times return on our ad spend, we should be spending a million dollars a year on Expedia. I mean, this is just simple math, right? TripAdvisor is 14.3 times. That's what the numbers say. I mean... If I could 14X any investment, I mean, we need to triple and double that. I'm just making a comment. That's a real number. That's something to look at moving forward in the summer months, if the return is that good for hotels. I know with short-term rentals, I don't know what Tom does or Brian, but Expedia is a very small partner. I don't do a lot of Expedia bookings. VRBO is decent, but Expedia is not. So for short-term rental market, it's not viable. But I know for hotels, it's super strong. And maybe, Luis, you could chime in. I don't know. What percentage of bookings are Expedia in the summer? Roughly. Virtually.

No, for us it's a lot. It's quite a bit. Especially because we're not a franchise property in our case. So we don't have the support of the brands themselves. So we depend a lot on Expedia and Booking.com to fill in the hotels.

Casey, doesn't the ad platforms, when Expedia acquired Vrbo, isn't it the same ad platform, normally marketing the destination on Vrbo as well, through that channel? Yes. Okay, very good. So you're gonna see them come in through different channels. Hotels are gonna see Expedia, VRMs are gonna see Vrbo.

Yeah, of course, but you're speaking to different guests. In that way, you're speaking to a hotel client differently than you're speaking to a short-term rental client, which is why the difference in Vrbo and Expedia.

Right. They're using the same platform. The ad platform is all I'm referring to to launch those campaigns.

Yeah, but they're not going to Vrbo. I mean, hopefully they're going to Vrbo and booking at that particular point instead of through Expedia. Right.

Right. Casey, if you could just take note and maybe just send us some screenshots of the back end of the ad platform and when it comes to what kind of ads are running for hotels and which kind of ads are running for vacation rentals.

Yeah, of course.

Thank you.

Yes, we are absolutely. So I'm sorry to cut you off. Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Good afternoon. I wanted to respond to two of the comments here. First off, you all seem to have come around to it. There's no one we're not marketing to. We're just pushing more money in front of different markets. And so even if that market doesn't speak to you specifically as an accommodation sector, it speaks to someone on the island. And the demonstration of that is that this has been a great summer for all of us. I picked up Cindy Decker's presentation from last month when we were all together and wanted to share with you that for April 1st to June 30th, the top origin markets were, of course, the Valley as we know, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, Austin, and then we get into Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Denver, Aurora, Centennial. Those destinations all made the list of top 10 origin cities according to the data that we get for April 1st to June 30th. And I'd also like to say I think that there's value in maintaining us top of mind year round so that when people are making their plans for that dead of the winter, we're the ones that come forward. So just wanted to share. that according to the data that we heard last week up until June 30th, Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, and Kansas City are all making the list in minimal amounts. We know that the Valley and Texas is our major market.

And so on that Tier 3, we've got 11 markets in there. Four of those cities are probably viable based on the data coming back. So what I'm suggesting is just a little bit more pinpoint bombing, so to speak, on that. Some of these might need to be adjusted, that's all. I don't know if Tier 3 is a big spend anyway. Is it 10% of the budget? This might all be a moot point.

Maybe less.

Yeah, so that's why I don't know if it's a moot point. But if it is 10%, hey, we're coming back four or five cities are viable. There's probably six or seven here that aren't, and that's my point on this. Thank you, Chad.

It's a valid point, and I just want to finish with my point, sir, is that everybody's going to be catering to a different segment, and so I do think it's important that we maintain those broad spectrums and don't get too narrow focusing on any one segment.

Thank you, Chad. Casey, yes, if you could. Do you agree that it's approximately 10% or less for the Tier 3?

Yeah, it's very low for Tier 3.

Is that the clarification you were looking for? Yeah. Very good. Casey, please continue.

Perfect. Okay, no problem. Yeah, we have some follow-ups there for you that we will give. I would also call out that like next year, it's even more refined. Our summer budget is 85% Texas. So then it gets even smaller for all surrounding markets. Anyway, so we can follow up with all those details that you asked for. All righty. Okay. So then this is it. This is the last one here. So we had our OTA program. This is Minus Trip Advisor. This is just focusing on Expedia. Priceline Booking Hopper. Going back to your point, Chad, like you're spot on. Like the way that this is tracked is if you are serving an impression, and getting in front of someone who engages with your ad, and then eventually books for South Padre, if there's a connection to your advertising program, they're assigning some sort of revenue value to you. And so we look at it and go, okay, that's good. But to your point, it's right. It's like, that's, it's not a crystal clear picture of attribution, but it is giving us a sense of impact. And so within the program, we'll go line by line across Expedia and look at the lines and the audiences that are driving a conversion and the ones that are not. And so we're at least, even though I agree with you that it is like an indirect, a little bit funky math that they're doing, we're trying to make sure we optimize for the people that are booking and so we're at least improving that number so that we're not getting low lower quality inventory or wasting impressions on audiences that aren't going to book or whatever that is so that we're at least moving us in the right direction to the point on um optimizing entirely for that revenue you're right like if it was a true and steady 100 to one revenue, we should give every ounce, every penny we've got to Expedia. Obviously that's not the case though. Like we're going to run into some sort of diminishing return. I don't know necessarily where that is. I know that we have continued to increase our numbers with them over the first two years and the return on ad spend is not dropped yet. I think a lot of that is just getting in front of the right people and making sure our target, our message, et cetera, is better. But so far, I agree with everything you said. We're going to continue to try to optimize that program. But their world is an imperfect one, and we're trying to maximize what we can do within that. So anyway, 7 million impressions, 16,000 clicks, and as I noted, strong booking revenue and room nights, even though it is indirectly associated with the program.

That's it. Casey, one of the things I noticed this summer and even more, and we talk about every year, but the booking window gets shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. I mean, I saw as much as 25% of our business not book until a week ahead, you know, and it's insane. And I'm wondering if that's just a demographic trend, a spending issue, or is there something that we're doing or can do or should be doing in order to continue to, you know, the last minute booking is still a booking, you know, even though it's a short window. But, I mean, it's just something to me that we need to look at in a little bit more detail.

Yeah, we can definitely dive into it. We'll go into the terms of economic state and I can prepare something for you. I will say at a high level, it's pretty much what all of our clients are facing right now because of how the market is currently behaving. Everyone is kind of holding on. They've got money reserved for vacation. That's the trend, but they're not committing it until the picture is as clean as possible. So most people are booking online. last minute in all destinations that we're currently managing and tracking to. So it seems to be a pretty broad trend that that's what's happening. I don't know without a big economic shift in the marketplace, I don't know that we can change too much of that. But that said, I don't want to give you a generic answer. I'll go back through the data and try to pull out as much as I can. And we can come prepared during the next meeting to have some insight and some thought about how to improve that.

Well, my question also is does that modify our messaging? How does that change messaging in terms of waiting until the last minute? And you're right, I think that's what they're doing is just waiting to get clear pictures and clear ideas and stuff. But does that change messaging then?

I think with the OTAs, again, this is just more of a brainstorm than a true answer for you, so I will get something more certain. But I think with the OTA things and when we're creeping towards a decision, we can certainly try to create some urgency and message and try to push them to take advantage of a seasonal deal or something where the consumer feels like, I need to act now. For the brand stuff and where we're staying top of mind, I don't know that you really needed to change it because to Chad's earlier point, we're getting a really high frequency of impressions against those people. And so when they do finally make the decision, South Padre Island is already top of mind. I think those things work really well together. We could just tinker with deal offer or whatever that is.

that incentive that we can create in the market to make people feel you know excited to make that decision thank you you know tom one of the things that i've noticed is that very rarely even even over the fourth of july the biggest problem i see is that we don't we get a lot of that last minute demand And so there's not a sense of urgency for guests to really book at that moment. It's so easy for them to go, let's say, on Airbnb and click South Padre Island, the dates that they want. And there's 200 options or 500 options. So as they're scrolling through, they're seeing, okay, I've got 20 of these that I like, that they like. And so they wait until those are getting booked. and then all of a sudden, when they get down to their top five left, okay, I better book now. And that doesn't happen until, I mean, even the 4th of July, we were sold out, but it wasn't until that, like, three or four days before it, and only specific days. The other thing that I noticed was, especially during the summer for us, was people were booking weekends further out, 14 to 21 days out, roughly, but we were getting a lot of the weekdays were the last minute. And so... it's more a matter of how do we create that demand so that it puts a little bit of pressure for people to start booking ahead. That's number one. Number two, the other thing is, is that because we're a driving market, people are also waiting, what's the weather going to be like? What are my options? And then they're no longer just looking at South Padre. They're looking at other beach locations that are within driving distance as well. So it's not just a matter of the availability that we have. It's availability that's going around everywhere else. And so it's kind of a, Tricky. How do we get that? How do we get that better demand? And early on. But I still think weekdays were very, I mean, you know, back in the day, it used to be Sunday to Sunday rentals for us. And now it's two or three days. And, you know, now it takes me three reservations to make up a full week.

I can't.

Well, some of it could be, too. Like, we have very strong Valley market, but we might need to kind of have an education program. I think I brought this up before. Like, they love the weekend, right? But if we can educate them that in the summer, doing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays, half off, maybe it's worth taking off of work, we can keep that same market but shift them when it not only is less expensive for them, but also it fills up those days because it's still even less than four July week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we're either giving the right away or doing a very last minute booking.

All approach.

Thank you. Casey, you mentioned the video content is the most successful thing that drives results. Who exactly specifically is producing the video and how much of it is AI and how frequently is it changed?

The video is done by Greenhouse. We created it based on a shoot last year. And it's 100% authentic video content. There's no AI in the video at all. There's multiple video assets that we leverage throughout the program, depending on audience, depending on message. But yeah, we haven't updated it this year, but there's a lot of assets and there's no... There's no formal saturation, meaning we haven't used it too much, but we're continuing to optimize the video program for sure.

Very good, thank you, Casey. Yeah, okay, cool. Gentlemen, anything else for Casey? All right, Casey, thank you so much for putting that together, and send Cindy over that few things that we discussed, and I'm sure she'll get that to us in our inbox.

If you got it. Thank you all.

Thank you so much for your time this morning.

Chairman, I want to share with you that Greenhouse will be here starting on Sunday. We've got a week of production for new assets. We've picked some new families, some new Texans, some college students, and they'll be here for a full week doing production for that. And we want to thank everyone who's given us an activity, a dinner, or accommodations for that production.

Very good. Wow.

I like it. Not once every 10 years.

City's going to try to do it every year.

Wonderful. That's great. Anything else? Okay. We'll move to 5.2. Discussion of possible action to approve the forecast pro forma for the convention center and hotel motel tax fund budgets for city council approvable for fiscal year 26-27.

I'm just gonna stand up here to present this. This is a presentation that I had hoped that you all would see before we took it to city council, but they've been moving pretty quickly through their decision process with the convention center. Armando, if you would put the presentation up. So I'm gonna go through this with the purpose of showing you how city council has instructed us and the chief financial officer to account for the debt service on the convention center and how that would affect or not affect us as the marketing and destination management group. Thank you. Mondo, do I have control? Oh, there you go. And I'm gonna go through this pretty quickly. Stop me when you need me to.

Okay, great.

So with the hotel occupancy tax, we have three different funds that we fund into. The city of Sal Padre charges 17 cents, which is higher than any other destination that I've worked in. We're actually charging the maximum amount of hotel tax that's allowed by the state. Two and a half of those cents actually are specifically for what they call the venue tax. Yesterday, we just did a ribbon cutting for the medians. They look really great. I hope you like them. And you should be very proud because you helped to put those in by the generation of hotel occupancy tax that was paid for with that. There were five projects apparently that the voters voted on for the hotel tax. The medians were one, the wind park which has been started, the windsurfing park is another one. The convention center expansion is another one. I think there's a parking deck in there. And there might be some kind of observation deck to be able to view the SpaceX launches. The rest of the funding goes into two different categories. We get in the city of Sao Padre $0.08. I think hopefully you all have heard me talk about pennies. Every one cent of tax is one penny. And right now, one cent of tax for the year is worth $1.5 million. So the eight cents is worth about $12 million all told, and more or less that's the budget that we've been managing. In the operations, we put our administration, our marketing, what we're calling events culture and arts now, that's your special events, and we're gonna add the debt service to that. We're not taking 100% of the debt service, we're taking 75% within our operations, which is about 1.125 million a year. and then the convention center gets another part of that in 06, and that is the money to keep the convention center operating and the sales. I have to say to you that in Galveston, we financed the convention center for 30 years out of the venue tax, which means the only project that they did in Galveston in 30 years was the convention center, because that venue tax was committed for 30 years to that project. What they've proposed here in Padre is very innovative, I think, from a private sector perspective, appropriate. We are rolling in big portion of that debt into our operations. We as a business are going to cover that debt service year upon year, which allows the venue tax to stand over here and continue to occur $3 million a year so that if the community decided they wanted to do the parking deck or the observation deck or eventually wanted to do other projects, you have not committed your venue tax for 30 years. you're still able to go forward and do some other projects. And again, I find that as a business person to be very appropriate, because our debt is then being covered by our operations and not by an outside tax, which makes us more fiscally responsible. I'm going to go through a five-year projection. There's been two pro formas done for city council previously by consulting firms. This is the first one that your operational team put together and I know that you all as operators understand the value of having the people who manage actually make the budget as opposed to somebody from the outside coming in. So this budget is actually forecasted based on lower hotel revenues than you're making this year. In order to be fiscally conservative, they didn't raise the tax to what you've done this year. The CFO has kept it at what is 15 million, which is our 12 million plus the three million from the venue tax. 15 all told. We will do 16 million this year, but she forecasted it at 15. She's a finance person. She wants to be safe. She doesn't want to... extend too far. So if you go down to about the fourth line, you'll see the hotel motel for this allocation for this convention center. In here, you've got the sales and the convention center employees, and that drops down after all told for the first year, we're only clearing $120,000, which is different from this year, which you're gonna clear about two million. So we're consuming that debt service which is in there. The biggest expenses I have on the convention center, and those of you who run facilities know this, is my energy, my insurance, and my water. Eating my lunch over there on that building. And that's what you see on that miscellaneous line. We did account for in the construction that the electric was gonna go up by 75% and the water's gonna go by 60%. So those hard costs are in there. Also in there is staff for the convention center don't foresee having to staff up very big much more the sales team we've been operating with one salesperson and really I heard something at a conference recently that I I apply to us. We're not really selling, we're scheduling. We've got enough business in the convention center and enough repeat business that we're bringing the same groups through. Region one, anybody hosted region one? And that's great, I'm not complaining about that. But when we have new facilities, I don't need to go out there and get a bunch of new salespeople. What I need to do is have my sales plan in place, my markets in place, all my people trained and we're going out there and we're building business. Where I do need to increase staff is the guys that are turning the center over every day. They're moving 100 tables, they're moving 1,000 chairs. I can't do that with AI, I can't do that on a computer. I need the guys that make that happen. All told, this budget continues to drop to the bottom line, not the same way we have, but if revenues come in higher for the hot tax because they're already coming in higher, those reserves or those excess revenues will fall to the bottom line and go into the reserves.

Kelly, on FY 2029, you showed the hotel-motel tax actually dropping from the previous year.

That is because what she's doing is she's playing with the allocation at the top. Here for your marketing you get this much, here for your sales you get this much, and that year she switched it because that was the third year and that was when the 75% electric hit and the 60% water hit. So what she did is she took a little less here and she put a little bit more over there. Any other questions? So then this is operations. This is what we should be concerned about because this is Cindy's budget. And we want to make sure, as we've heard from a lot of the stakeholders, that we continue to increase our marketing dollar. and to get the return based on the investment that we're making, of course. So on this, you'll see in 2030, the hotel-motel drops a little bit, but then it starts to come back. Again, Tom, that's because of those expenses we're trying to cover in the other budget. Administration stays the same. Arts and culture comes down a little bit, and marketing, they've kept what we asked for this year, and you'll remember that they gave us some increases this year, but the following years, it gets just a little bit skinnier. This is a forecast. If the hotel tax is coming in more significantly and we're able to build back some of our reserves, we'll be able to advocate for that money and bring it back in. Both the CFO and the city manager and the mayor have said to me that if we get halfway through the year and there's some things that we need to do and the money's coming in, we'll just go back for a budget amendment. This is an important line for you all as the board to watch. We don't want the construction to encroach upon us being able to do business and the marketing is a big piece of that. So there again, we've got revenues over expenses, and we continue to accrue in government. When you don't use the money, it automatically goes into reserves. You don't get to pick it up for the next year unless city council approves that. What you do is you just start banking in your reserves. So here is the venue project per se. You'll see what they are planning to spend every year there. You'll see the wind and water sports venue in there. The medians are in there. The debt service for the convention center, their part will be $375,000. And then this is, you can see by next year, not 2027, but 2028, the venue, because they're taking the money out of the venue tax this year to help pay for the bond starting in 2028, that money is simply accruing into a savings account for more venue. And then that all, well give me a minute and I'll get there. Here's the estimated total project cost for the project. Broadus is the, what do they call that, the client owner's representative. There it is, the owner's representative. Broadus is the group that got the convention center down from $89 million to $50 million project all told. You've got Janak who is the architect for that. The majority of those architecture fees have already been paid for the designs that you all generated over the last couple of years. They're just modifying those designs to the last request. Fulton is the contractor for that project. MEP betterment means that it's a fixed price. The contractor is contracting with the city, if they're successful, to guarantee a price that won't have overruns. And so that's got a dollar figure attached to it. And then they've got contingency. And right now, we're working on the FF&E. I will say to you, and Bob, maybe you can fill me on this one, we're expanding the convention center by about 75% of the footprint, not 100%, not doubling it, but almost. and then we're putting a ballroom on the back that's gonna have three divisible rooms that we can make into meeting rooms, but we're not touching my kitchen. And so I'm gonna have to continue to double produce out of that kitchen for more foot space than I have. So you're probably gonna hear me squawking about that because in order to have two groups in house at the same time, I gotta figure out the kitchen. So little by little, you feel me?

Challenge.

All told, $55 million project. This is kind of the cash flow and the funding sources. They'll take $5 million out of the convention center revenues. They'll take $14 million that they've been able to save already out of the operations, $14 million out of the venue tax, and then they're gonna issue a bond for $19.5 million, and where they are in the process right now is city council has instructed the CFO and the bond council to go out and come back with a package to recommend to the city, and I believe they're gonna do that at the beginning of October. They're moving, yes. So that makes the $52 million that they're looking for the project. That's the total price of the project. What that will do, we will maintain in our operations a $4.9 million reserve. We are leaving $4.9 million in the reserves, because God For bid, we get a storm and we need to activate and we don't have any revenues coming in, that's the emergency fund that we have right there. So if something happened, we are able to respond. In excess of the money that they're taking out, they have 24 total. So out of that 19, after they take the four, five million of reserves out, they're left with 19, out of that 19, they're gonna take 14, and then they're leaving another $5.7 million in there. So you've got your reserves that are only for emergencies to be touched, six months of operating expenses, and then you've got another reserve on top of that. Same thing for the convention center, there's a total of $6.6 million in that fund currently. The six month reserve is about a million dollars. They're gonna take five million out of the fund and they're only gonna leave 725,000 in the convention center, but we do have operations for six months should we need it. This is the venue tax. They've got 17 million in the venue tax. They're going to take out 14 million, so they're leaving 3.3 million in the venue tax. This is the fund balance for each of those. What she's done is just what we said in a consolidated form. Each of those revenues, each of those emergency funds, and what will be available at the end. I think the highlight here is if you look in the middle of the page, fund three. The estimated funds that they'll have for a new venue project by 2031 is already $11 million in the bank, provided that we only generate $15 million a year in hotel tax at a time when we're generating 16 currently. That's what I had. Any questions?

Not about the funding.

Say again, Tom?

Not about the funding.

We do, fortunately we do have some money. I'm not asking you all to approve this. I had originally asked that because it was gonna go to Council. But given the fact that we've got a budget for this year that has the marketing money in it that we want and we're gonna have to go back and amend the budget that City Council already approved for this year to incorporate this debt service, I think I would like to ask Chairman for your approval of the pro formas and in particularly, concurrence with the budget for operations and marketing.

DAVID BURRAGE- Kelly, do you see any downside to the amount of money coming out of the fund for this in terms of budget for what

My concern was what I iterated to you, is that if we were going to assume the debt service inside of our operational budget, I needed to make sure that none of the operations were going to be impacted, specifically our marketing dollars. And I feel like we've done that well. Unfortunately, sales in the convention center did take a little bit of a hit. But we'll be able to work through that. I'm not concerned. I'm more concerned about the fact that Scott Joslov, president of the Hotel and Lodging Association, came to city council two weeks ago. or two months ago and said to him, the hot tax you're not allowed and you're not supposed to be saving it. The fact that you've got $30 million in the bank is not necessarily a good thing. The hot tax is meant to be invested. You're generating it in a year so that we can spend it in the year in order to help build the next year. It's not something that you go storing. So I think that they need to spend it. And my understanding, although I wasn't here, is that this is one of the things that the voters voted on.

Just I guess the one concern, I mean, I believe that the convention center should be expanded. We need a bigger one, right? Everybody else is doing it in the state of Texas. There's possibly one in Brownsville opening up this coming year. McAllen's is bigger, Harlingen's is bigger. So we definitely are on the smaller side of it and we are the only one with a beach. So it makes a big difference when you're able to sell the event space and the beach together. I think it'll bring business to it. I guess my one concern seeing this is the downtime. How long is the convention center gonna be down? Is it gonna be down and closed for an extended period of time?

You know the answer to this. You're a hotelier. They told me I can't close it.

I just wanted to be sure that, Because there's groups there, and this forecast doesn't really show that the business is going away.

No, it doesn't. We had direct instructions from council to maintain the building. The contractors had that instructions as well. And so because these are additional buildings being added on to the infrastructure, or to the structure. What they're gonna do with the exhibit hall, for example, is we'll keep operating the exhibit hall. They're gonna build into one of those side parking lots, and after the expansion is built, then they'll bring down the wall to minimize the amount of days that will be down. You know what, though? I think we should probably be tracking how many days we are down,

and when you have events. We did, it took us two years, two and a half years to do the balconies and the front of the building at the Isla Grande. We had events. It really hurt us with a lot of groups that left because of the noise in the construction. They're having meetings, conferences, and so if you have the drilling, the heavy duty stuff, it's going to definitely impact. That impacted us to where groups left. They went either to a different city, they went to a different hotel. Some of them came back, but some of them, they were just either more comfortable where they were at. So we had to go through that battle, one year of recovery. And then we, right now, it looks like we're getting back together with groups and events. So thankfully, I mean, we've had a good year. I can't complain about that. But that was one of the things that I remember did impact us a lot when we went through that.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think we are fortunate that we have a lot of repeat business. And so that's going to allow us to have very detailed conversations with the people who have been clients with us forever. We do have $90,000 in the budget to buy down business. So if it got really sticky with someone, we could offer to forego some of the expenses. We could pick up some expenses for them. What we might have to do is severely discount the convention center for the time that we're spending. And then those first two years when we open, offer additional discounts for anybody who stayed with us during that time. But then the idea is to push it up. Because again, we're only making probably a half a million dollars off that convention center in revenues. That hadn't been a goal for the convention center. The goal is to place business with, with you all in the hotels. That's where the money maker is not in reviewing it. So if we have to suddenly put down some money to buy business, we've thought about that and we know that this is gonna be difficult. So I can come cry to you and you'll feel my pain. Construction.

When do we start to see the dirt turn?

That, we are not to the point where the project has been approved yet, but if the schedule as they would like to see it, before the end of the calendar year, they would be dumping dirt in, when you drive up to the parking, to the convention center on the right hand side, there's a parking lot up close, and that's where they're gonna build into. If you'd like, I'm happy to have the Broadus come in and share with you the design so that you can see what they're working on. It's up to you all to decide how much you want to get involved. I asked Sean to allow me to present this item because this is a financial item. This is how we're financing it, and I think it's important that everybody understands the decision that the city has made.

I guess just following up on my question, do all the groups that have been coming know about the potential that they're going to be impacted during their event?

Not yet. We're working with the city lawyer to create, to update a construction amendment that'll go on the contracts. But until city council signs the contract, we didn't want to reach out.

Yeah, I get that.

Yeah, okay. Just didn't want to borrow grief.

No, no, no. I mean, I foresee that some of them may say, hey, we're not comfortable with it.

More so, Luis, and this is the God honest truth. More of the people that I talk to say, we're so glad that you're making the expansion. We're about to outgrow the center and we've been here for 10 years. I hear that regularly.

I've gotten that from some of the groups that we've gotten there that the convention center might be too small. Sometimes our venue space as well, they say it's too small for them, so they're looking for other options. Usually we push them off to you guys when that's the case, but I've been getting that a lot lately.

The next agenda item gets us into that.

Exactly.

All right.

I am looking for a vote if you all are comfortable with the pro forma to say that you're comfortable with the pro formas.

A motion to approve. I think it's great that we're finally seeing some of the excess funds we've been sitting on go to work. A motion to approve.

I second that. Do you need any more detail, or is that sufficient for you? All right, very good. Discussion?

I think that as a community, one of the things that we haven't done a very good job with on the convention center is just kind of twofold. And I just wanted to say this so that other potentially people who watch this just, you've got to make a decision on things like this. Sometimes if you're going to kind of like play junior varsity your whole life or move up to varsity, and I always use football analogies, but that's where we're at. Austin's got what a billion or $2 billion convention center going in. I know we're no Austin, but we get into like second tier possible conventions. If we're competing, like Luis said, with Brownsville or Galveston, Port A, whatever it is, Something's got to be done there if we're going to try to make varsity. So if it's, hey, let's put a new roof on it and repaint it and it's fine. The problem with that is, again, you're just not going to move up to the better squad. And that's my concern. The second thing that I think that we haven't talked about much is if you don't want this, then you have to come to us with a plan on how you plan on filling September 15th to December 15th. because I haven't seen any. We can continue to approve these small events like we do, which is great. I mean, especially when we stack them, you can feel it. But when we bring in convention business in the off-season, it's a pretty big deal. And whether it will help short-term rentals or not, I know it won't hurt, because one of the things I have always been a huge advocate of personally is the more people you bring here, it becomes a word of mouth. So if someone comes here on a convention, we have a chance to get them back with their families later. If they never come here, you have nothing. I remember my friend Dan Stanton that used to be at Louie's Backyard that we all used to know. I'm like, how are you selling ribs for seven bucks? And Dan used to say, well, if I don't have anybody in here, I can't possibly sell them a drink or make a dollar. So it's just advertising. And that's something that I think we have to consider. We do have a reserve. And I know this is a controversial subject, but I think it's just something that we have to discuss the offseason. We have to discuss, are we going to go to the next tier as a destination, or are we just going to remain as, oh, yeah, South Padre, it's okay. And then we all sit around and complain that, you know, we're not pulling people from upstate. So that's my two cents on this before the final vote.

Yeah, because I mean, to my understanding, Fort Worth is expanding theirs or Dallas.

Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin, Houston's got a project going on. And then actually most concerning, our chief sales officer, Myra Nunez, came home from Texas Society of Association Executives, which is one of the biggest clients that we cater to. And Omni in Corpus Christi announced there that they're doubling the size of their in-house meeting rooms in Corpus, which will make them bigger than us. All rooms, food and beverage under one roof. That's competition for us right there.

Because they already have a larger space than we do, don't they?

And the fact that you can get the rooms and the F&B and the AV all under one roof is very attractive to some meeting planners. What we have is we have environment, we've got the beach, and as you all have mentioned, that's really powerful for a lot of these associations because their members will bring their families and make it a family vacation if it's a destination that they like. And so we have that benefit. But yeah, we've got stiff competition in the state.

Yeah, and I know that, I mean, I guess when you talk about it, it's like what I saw something on here about business that we've lost potentially, right? And that's just, I guess, from leads or different bids or stuff like that that have gone out there. But sometimes there's business that we may have lost that doesn't even go out there, that doesn't even reach that. Because I mean, I know for a fact if, let's just say, I'll use the grant as the example, right? If I'm going to book a wedding that requires 1,000 people, well i ask what's the mass capacity or look just google it well we can't do that right we i don't have the space for that am i even going to reach out am i even going to put in a bid for it i'll go to the specific locations that i know can do that um so i mean i wonder how much of that business we've lost Um, as well, um, and the more demand there is on the island, I mean, I'm surprised you guys were able to get the spacex event that's coming up. Um, that's I mean, I still don't know how that's going to happen. I still am worried about the logistics of it. Um, because that's way too many people for the convention center. You're talking, I think, 6,000 people for the convention center. I mean, the catering itself, you mentioned the kitchen, it's crazy. Somebody did some miracle, right, to convince them to come and stay and get it, because it's very tight. I mean, I saw what Longboards and Henrietta's did combined for their, when they launched their, SpaceX launched, and they somehow managed to handle that. So I mean, kudos to you guys for bringing that in, but we want more of those groups, because I mean, just doing the simple math, just in food, trying to feed all those people, usually it's like $20 a person or $50 a person, somewhere around there, you're talking about a couple hundred thousand dollars simply in just feeding them.

Yes.

In one day, one night.

I've said this to you before, we're generating about $150,000 in commissions. We have a 15% commission on food that's brought into the convention center, so that means somebody, various providers, are selling about a million dollars worth of food through the convention center. That's great. If you all will take the vote on this, we can talk about the lost business, which is something I wanted to talk about.

Anybody have anything else? All right, there's a motion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Five three, presentation of the Convention Center Laws Business Report for the years 2018 through 2025.

Amanda, will you bring up that agenda item for me to share? Some of you may know, and this is part education really, I'm sharing information with you and I'm gonna make a proposal at the end of this information sharing. The way the sales teams work is that they have a database called SimpleView. Every time we get a lead that comes in, we get leads from the website. We get leads from a service called Helms Briscoe. It's a subscription service that we pay into. We have subscriptions with a lot of youth sports organizations that are generating leads in that area. We get a lot of referrals and we have our marketing team who's putting advertising in Convention South and Convention and Meetings that's generating some leads for us as well. And so we have a lot that comes into the funnel per se. As I mentioned to you, we had one salesperson when I got here on a team that should have four salespeople. We divide into what we call SMRF, which is social, military, fraternal organizations. We have sports tourism. We're doing corporate and government, and we do a lot of government. And then we intend to have a sales manager up in the Austin, San Antonio area. Just that area geographically has a lot of headquarters and a lot of associations, and so it makes sense for us to be there. So within that framework then, what will happen is somebody will come in, we'll get a lead, we'll get assigned to that. The salespeople are amazing. They answer immediately to that. Then they will put it into the system and we'll start to form in it. Some of it comes down and they visit us, but some of it, like Luis says, they never even come to the destination because we respond to them virtually and say, we can take 1,000 people at 10 tops in the exhibit hall. We've got six breakout rooms, and it turns out that they need nine breakout rooms, or we just don't have enough space for them. So they've been, thank you Mondo, thank you for searching. So they had been tracking that lost business. This slide came from Hunden Partners, which is a group that was hired by the city to kind of help flesh out the feasibility, who our competition was for the convention center, and what the opportunities were. They simply mined this information out of our Simple View database. And the information that they got is that 73% of the business that we lost, we lost it through space constraints. 9% was for rates and hotel availability. 5% was during COVID, because we're looking from 2018 to now. And then 13% of the client counseled for one reason or other. We had somebody, and this is helpful, it's never a bad thing to question where we get numbers. And since I was new to this, this was interesting to me as well. And we, Hundon dug down into it and they presented, and it's in your pack and I don't wanna go over it, the list of lost business that we got. We got into a real conversation at city council about lost business. These are complicated systems to explain to people about how these things work to begin with if you're not in the industry. And I started to realize that this is not, I think, the information that maybe you all want to see right now or what helps us to communicate what we're doing in the convention center. You know one of the things that we haven't produced an indicator that might be helpful is usage days How many days has the convention center been used out of the 365 that we have and we can even go further we can do it Just like you guys do it in the hotel for occupancy if I have an exhibit hall, and I've got six meeting rooms I've got seven total rooms that I can occupy in a day and And in a day, how many of those rooms am I occupying? So that people begin to understand what the convention center is doing. Because if you don't go down there, you don't see. We've got a group in-house right now, the IRS. They've got 150 rooms that they booked. They're here for four days. That's 450 rooms if all of them stay for three days. And they've only got one room that they've booked out of the whole center. So I think we need to talk about the center in a different way than lost business. And the other thing is that we can create a lot of enthusiasm for the business that they are booking. As Luis mentioned, the team just booked SpaceX. To get 6,000 people in that space they call it a campus, they're going to occupy the whole campus. They're taking over parking lots, they're bringing in cranes, they're gonna have those guys that go around the pole that's 100 feet tall and they all swing around it out in one of the parking lots. They're taking over the other parking lot. I do have some operational issues right now because the county created a preserve in the birding area next to the convention center in what we call the bowl, the big roundabout area, and they had thought about deploying in there, but now we're gonna try to turn them to some other things. They're talking about taking the slings and having races around the bowl right there. They're taking the whole exhibit hall and they're turning it into a giant rave where you've got three different options of music on your headphones, and there's video arcade games all over that, and they're doing jello shots and stuff. I mean, it's over the top. What we've asked them for is the ability to take some pictures. We need to show people what you can do with that. My biggest concern about that, Louise, is not the people. The fire marshal will do that. Yesterday, we lost internet. Sorry, Mondo. Yesterday, we lost internet in the center. I had, Monday it was, I had people that couldn't work, our team couldn't work, several of us had to go home and work, and then I had that group of 150 in the house. My concern about the convention center is making the backbone for technology, because we are not servicing groups today. We're talking about a building that's gonna take 30 years to pay off, and we need to be able to have a future vision for where we're going. So when I talk about FF&E, furniture, fixtures, and equipment with the team, I'm not talking screens and fancy stuff like that. We're talking cabling, conduits, internet capacity, and how do we develop that out because the other stuff is just accessories. We've got to have the backbone to make it all work, and the kitchen's like that too. The kitchen needs to be a basic utility that if I have a ball going on in the back of the house and I've got an exhibit hall in the front, I can attend... to both of those or I'm not leveraging the investment that we're making. So one of the indicators, the indicators I'd like to propose to you to begin to bring to you so that you can see what's going on is the usage days, the occupancy for the venue. I can report out the revenues that we make on it, but again, I don't think that that's very interesting. Those revenues are what we use to incentivize the business and what we're bringing in. The CFO has asked me to produce for the first six months I've been here. What has been the economic impact of the businesses they've booked in the six months that I've been here already? And so we're going to work on looking forward, showing you the business that we're working on right now, talking to you about how we're going to relocate that business over the next three years, and then talking to you about our occupancy.

And I know that you've mentioned the rooms.

And the thing I really enjoy about Salpadre is we're getting a lot of government business. And FYI, the per diem for Padre went up in the last 60 days. And so when those guys come, or when government comes, they each get their own room. They have per diem. And so they're spending money. We hosted a group last week. Maybe you saw the helicopters come in and land at the convention center. They're looking to book April 26 to the 30th, 300 rooms a night for four days.

And that helps, because I know that where I usually would have, because I see here 9% rates are the reason for turn down, right? There's some groups that I know we've turned down because of the rate, their government rate. And there's recently been a couple that have shown up that we've accepted it, where we typically wouldn't have with the old government rate. So I mean, so yeah, that's going to definitely help us.

Yeah, Luis, I don't think we're going to try to book that. business during the transient summer, right? We want those high transient rates. This is where the convention center is valuable, in the shoulder seasons and in the off season, to bring in that kind of rate. That group she just mentioned is coming in April.

But even then, I know there's, like you mentioned, during the summer, during the weekdays, sometimes we may want that business just to get us a nice little base, get us something there, because we do have some leftovers. I can't say I'm 100% sold out every night, even though I try really hard. But, I mean, if you're saying it's 20 rooms at that government rate of 160, you know, Monday through Tuesday, I mean, why not?

Great. Glad you see it that way. So you all are comfortable with what I'd like to bring to you and how, is there any additional information that you need to be able to speak about the value of the Convention Center or to ensure that we are getting value out of the investments that we're making?

Kelly, one of the things that I have a hard time understanding is why people can't understand lost business. To me, that's pretty plain and simple. I mean, here you are, here's the study, and I remember reading this, and I'm going, it's right here. $37.6 million economic impact off of lost business.

That we know of.

That we know of.

Right.

Exactly, and I just don't understand why that's so hard for people to understand. And I guess because the second part of the question becomes is what specifics relevant to the trends and convention meetings and facilities, like you say, are we still missing? I'm not even sure we're still asking all the right questions. in terms of what we're looking at in the future of who's going to come, given that it's a destination, and this is where we get into the strategic plan later on, are we then building out, like you say, the kitchen needs to be, what other infrastructure parts need to be included in this in order to accommodate the lost business? There's just multiple questions here.

just to be competitive. I mean, Austin's supposed to be the most technology-advanced convention center.

Yeah, we got SpaceX crazies over here.

Yeah, we have SpaceX over here that, you know, they're getting, you know, our 30-year-old convention center or, you know, so, yeah. So it's hard, it's gonna be hard to compete when we don't have all the things that they have, right? The beach is the biggest asset that we have, right? People are able to make a vacation out of the meetings and the conferences and all that. But yeah, I mean, I...

This is why some of this bothers me that it wasn't brought to us sooner in terms of, because now we're already contracting, we're building a facility, but are we gonna get halfway through it and realize, well, hey, we need to add this, we need to add this, the kitchen, you know. Where else are we going to need that we add to it and now all of a sudden we're halfway through a construction project.

Because we've operated in that kitchen. So we've operated in the kitchen and the last event we had there, it was difficult. It was tight to work. I mean, you guys have everything for, I mean, Catering? For a restaurant, actually. You guys have everything in the back for a restaurant. I don't know if it's exactly set up for catering. I think if you're gonna be expanding and have another ballroom and then having a couple of event spaces, then you need to double the size of it at least, storage-wise. That's the other question. I know that hallway's pretty wide, but I mean, it's still, you don't have enough bars. You don't have enough warmers, enough ovens. There's a lot of stuff to be able to cater multiple events at once. So you're going to have to mold it to businesses that can bring those things in until that kitchen gets expanded. So that's going to be a challenge in not every single mom and pop restaurant, because I know there's a couple of restaurants that do it right now. I know, like I said, we've done it and we've been able to bring our own stuff to make it work. because there isn't enough there to do it. Even the walk-ins, sometimes you have to share walk-ins there. So that's another challenge as well. So yeah.

I'm only smiling because we had somebody use the walk-ins and then when they got done with their event, they put a lock on it for a week. They had to go in there and cut it off. Yeah, it's challenging.

I think that was for us because we went into it and there was a lock in there.

It was, it was the group before you all. What's been done has been done already with the building and we'll make it work. We do have an opportunity right now with the FF&E and we have an opportunity in how we're gonna sell it. I think there's been some concern locally that we're gonna compete with McAllen. That is not my intent to compete with McAllen. We want to bring some of these government groups in. We want to bring them from farther, you know, so they'll stay longer. But we're fishing in the valley, and it's not bad to say that we're fishing in the valley, but we've got some assets and we will have a convention center that will allow us to bring people in from farther and do more work.

Kelly, when we spoke on Monday, and Tom, to this lost business, this doesn't include, and I think what, Kelly, correct me if I'm wrong, what you'll do is send our list of current business over to Hundon, and I don't know how difficult it is to notate groups like Ron Hoover, for example, that would like to expand and cannot due to space constraints.

Yes, I think it might have actually been you. We're adding a category on the database to start to measure those groups that have said to us.

Yeah, as I think there's opportunity there that we may not even truly realize that we have all kinds of things that take place at the convention center, but there's only so much space.

The only event that I host there is Maria Martini. I cannot have any more guests.

We'd like to. I mean, we could double the attendees into the middle of December, but we have no mechanism to allow for that, as an example. Anything else for Kelly? All right, there's no action on this item. Thank you very much for putting this together. A lot of clarification, appreciated. Okay. Five-four, discussion of possible action to approve the recommended collegiate spring break outreach plan for the fiscal year 26-27.

Great, I'm not sure why Cindy's name got next to this, maybe because it was marketing, but she's been working on her contracts, and I think we should have told you that we, council approved the contract to hire for Black Koi out of Mexico, and so Cindy's been throwing herself into that discussion, so that on October 1st, we're ready to go with our marketing in Mexico. Super excited, and so in the meantime, I am bringing forward to you a request for approval, and I'm pitching a three-year plan to engage with the collegiate market. Those of you who interviewed me have maybe heard me say, girl's gone wild, I'm not a big fan. But the more time I've spent down here in Padre, I can't help it that every time I talk to somebody outside of Padre, that's how they know us, is by spring break. And there's something in marketing where you don't fight against it. You lean into it. I think the issue for it, a couple issues. First thing is that I want to increase the value of your tourism for you. I can't do that in summer right now because we've got too much business in summer that if I doubled the amount of people that I was bringing to you in summer, you might do better. But we're going to... we're gonna kill the infrastructure, we're gonna kill the experience, the traffic is gonna be unbearable. So I have to start looking at where I can raise it. March is your fourth largest market. And the idea with that is is that we wanna be able to move the indicator where we can go. The two seasons that I'm proposing for this year coming up is March. I wanna make March produce. higher than it has and I wanna make the winter season, the Christmas holiday season as well and we're working on some things for that right now. I'm gonna try to start placing business and moving markets in these times. Eventually we'll come back to summer so you get higher rates but right now we gotta even out the year a little bit. You got too many peaks and dips. So if I go back to the spring market and I think about what is there and what advantages that we have, one of the things that I hear is, you know, no more college students. When I started engaging with Chad, and I am a former Greek. I was president of my sorority. No kidding. Headbush. You know, we do a lot of travel. It's not just around spring break. Now they have fall break. They do formals. Maybe even some of you are doing some business with the Greek formals here. They come in with their dates. They, you know, buy. When I was at U of H, we came down here, as a matter of fact, to South Padre for a couple of our parties as well. And then these are the future business people of tomorrow. The other thing we've got that we haven't been leveraging is 2,000 Baptist students that are coming down here every year and they want to do something for us. The third thing we've got is we've got a hard investment in spring break for security that whether we're leveraging it or not, we're spending almost a quarter of a million dollars on the lifeguards, the beaches, and the police because we have to. I have said to a couple of you, as a marketer, nobody is out of my mix. If you're purple, I'm going to market to you. If you're gay, I'm going to market to you. If you want to come in the middle of summer or the middle of winter, I'm going to market to you. I don't care if you're going to spend money. I don't care what you look like, your orientation. And I think that's part of it with this spring break. We're not gonna define South Padre by spring break, absolutely not. But are we gonna slice out a piece of that market that creates a little bit of ambiance on the island during spring break and makes it fun, and try to create in this world where alcohol sales are going down, some alternative spring break opportunities by mixing the Greeks and the Baptists and seeing what we can get. Mm-hmm, yep, yep. So the idea is to create some collegiate awareness, to use the Greek organizations not to push people one off, but as groups to come, to use the roadshow model that we've done previously, and then to build a database of the fraternal organizations so that we know who the chapter president, vice president, social coordinator is, and during the year, we're interacting with them and we're pulling them just like regular salespeople. But it starts with a roadshow. This is what I had said to you previously. These are your tax collections. July is going to be the gray, which is the highest one. And then March is your blue, which is your lowest bar. And you can see 2026 is on the left, We've been growing that market. March has been coming up, but we still have a lot of ways that we can go. When I asked the budget coordinator in the institution to help me, he's identified that there's about a $280,000 difference in collections between March and August, which is the second highest one. And that's the gap that I want to go after right there. The program architecture is this is first year. We want to acquire some assets. I'd like to create a brand campaign for this in particular that we speak through. We'd like to have a landing page that's for collegiates in particular. So if you have a spring break offer that you would like to offer, then we'll have a page for that particularly where we drive people. If you don't want the spring break crowds, Don't give me an offer and we won't have them in your place then, but I know that there will be some few that want that. And then we're going to go through and we're gonna, as I said, gather emails, not with the purpose simply of calling them and following up, but of creating a relationship by offering them opportunities to come down and host their formals, do their fall vacation here, or do their spring break vacation. The second year then, We begin to lean in that. We've already established the first year connection. The second year, we're going back. We're following up on that connection. We're offering them some offerings for their formers and their socials, and we're beginning to interact with the Baptists then about clarifying creating a alternative spring break activity that they are the volunteers for, that they manage, and some of the biggest collegiate Baptist unions are in these Midwest states. So just like the Greeks, that socialize and work together. The Baptists do the same in these Baptist unions. So we want to start moving those people towards the coordinators that are already here and already working with them so they can expand their program as well because that's something that they've been working on. so that by the third year we've got this database of collegiate going, we've got our database of Baptist going, and then the third year we launch some type of outdoor competition between the schools that is organized by the Baptist. We're not the staff for that. They're the ones that are out there organizing it. Maybe we buy the toys. for them and we're going to approach the alcohol distributors who have a requirement to support non-alcoholic activities as well and hope that they'll partner with us and fund us on some of this. I'm asking for approval to spend $35,000 of our marketing money on this initiative this year. I've got about $5,000 of giveaways that we're gonna leave. We're looking for some of those big, large, round coolers that we would put South Padre, Texas' best beach on it. leave the beer coolers in the fraternity houses with them. We've talked about doing some collegiate schedules, magnets that we leave that have their collegiate schedule on it, and Sal Padre, just things to keep top of mind, and then of course some swag to give away. This would, we would try to hit, we were looking to do it bigger and hit more campuses yesterday. We went back over and refined the program a little bit. Instead of 20 to 25 campuses, we feel confident that we can do 16 campuses in eight states. We wanna build the database, I said, then we're gonna sequence marketing around that. Oh, and we're gonna have a social media campaign that three days before the team hits the destination, we'll start pushing out social media. They hit the destination and then we follow it up with social media in place as well. So we're doing a week of social media just in that destination as they're moving around and capturing connectivity there. These are some of the benchmarks. That first one changes. We'll do 16 campuses. We can commit to 60 fraternities in our database. That's gonna lead to about 100 qualified decision makers and we'll hit about 60 chapters there. These are just some of the indicators that I've committed to and that I would commit Inertia Travel, who would be our partner in this, to generating those as well. We believe that we can bring about 500 attributable travelers in the first year to this, and that this is a good spend for us. Second year, as I mentioned, we would start to build on the base that we have. We're not cold calling at this point. We're bringing in the Baptists. And then the third year, we've got some Greek challenges, maybe some service that they do. I was really inspired when I watched SpaceX turn the exhibit hall into a rave and arcade. And I wondered if some of those arcade games, we couldn't create them outside. a Mario go kart track that you put people on, laser tag, and it's not that the CVB would do this, we have to do this through partners. This has to be a service that someone else is doing, and in this case, the Baptist students with the 2,000 of them that are here, they're the ones that are harnessing, moving, directing, creating enthusiasm around that. We've hit identified schools in Maybe that's on a slide here. It is we've identified these schools One of New Mexico there we go and these also have some of the largest Greek Counts in them as well, so we thought that that was a good fit and This is the accountability. There'll be direct deliverables back on this. We will have leads going to the website with the offerings on them. We'll have a database that they're helping to fill out with connectivity. And then once that roadshow is over, those attributes are internalized and our sales team and our social media groups start working on them. And we will report back to you. We would like to get started. I went ahead and I talked to our city manager because I am proposing to you that we spend some money on collegiate spring break and wanted to make sure that the city was in agreement with that. And he said something that I think that you're going to relate to, which is that every year we say that we're gonna move away from the collegiate spring break, but then about the time January, February comes and the pacing and the bookings aren't coming in like we need them, We make a knee-jerk reaction and then we put money back into the market Maybe we put a hundred hundred and fifty thousand into the market we're asking for thirty five thousand dollars now to start in October and see if we can't raise awareness about South Padre Island and before they all go home for the holidays and make their spring break vacation. The message will be on ease of access, road trips, and the value that we have here. The idea is not to make it a wild, wild time. It's to make it a time to spend community with your friends in a safe environment that Padre can provide. And with that, I am asking for feedback and hopefully approval.

I mean, I like the plan in regards to going first, getting the, I guess, finding the Greek partners and everything. I do have a concern in regards to the mix of the Baptist kids and the college students. And just because, what, three years ago when we did the collegiate days there in front of the East LeGrand, well, they got the Baptist kids to be the ones doing the events and all that stuff. And one of the things that ended up happening is I guess the kids started preaching to the attendees about maybe this is not the best thing for you to be doing. Maybe this is. So you had that clash of personalities. And that is just something that, I mean, seeing it does concern that that's going to happen. They're great. I mean, they take care of them. They move them around. At some point, they mix well. It's just a matter of who is gonna be there and how strong-minded they are mixing with the collegiate students. So that's maybe something to consider. Thank you for that. And then, I mean, I'd just be, I'd be interested to see if any of the partners can join going out there, I guess, you know, maybe they themselves taking their own giveaways and stuff like that they can leave out in regards to maybe trying to get their business, I mean, to South Padre Island as a whole, right, but still in their own individual locations. I know I'd be interested. I think other people in here would be interested as well. Yeah, there is some people that are not going to be interested, and that leaves the families that are left you know, at some point, I mean, I know we've directed families to other locations, so it doesn't mean that we're pushing them away, it just means that we're gonna redirect them.

I hope would be, Luis, that if you all approve this today, we're gonna start working pretty quick, reaching out to all the partners to see who wants to be involved and at what level they wanna be involved, if it's just simply listing their offering on the special page that we'll create, or if they wanna be a part by giving some shotskis and following up on the leads that are being generated.

Perfect. And so what I saw here, 1,500 room nights, but you also mentioned closing that gap, competing, I guess, with August. Which one do you see as the real benchmark, as the goal?

I have said to you when I got here, I'm going to work on moving the hotel occupancy tax because that seems to be the clearest delineation of increased business. So I'll create some tangible goals for you. We have a memorandum, and I'll bring that back at the next one and share with you exactly what we're going to hit for.

OK. And then just one, I guess, the last thing. There's nothing here that says the fraternities that we're going to, that they're from universities that may be in the shorter weeks. Because that's when we really need the help. It's not really Texas week itself. I know now it's split. So I mean, that's help. But that center mass of Texas week is, I'm really not pushing discounts. I'm really not pushing. to give anything away. And it's the shoulder time that I need help. And I know this coming year might be a one-off year, because we have Easter in March, if I'm not mistaken. So you're gonna see an increased March, and then the next year you're gonna see drop in it because you're not gonna have the support of Easter right and that last week of March is always real difficult to to fill up usually it's we have to look for events groups something of that sort to fill it up in our property but I mean this year you don't need that because you have Easter that's gonna do it for you

Yeah, let me bring back a list of all of the spring break dates for the schools that we're going to. And we'll start to kind of put our arms around how many fraternity and sorority houses are in each of those campuses so you can see it.

OK. Kelly, thank you very much for thinking outside the box.

Oh, thank you, Todd.

I really saw the opening line. It says use spring break as the acquisition point, not the end product. And I'm going, yeah, OK. That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, I mean, because I do hear it all the time. A lot of the families that I have now are families that started during spring break. Now they're telling their kids not to do it, right? And some of them were former spring breakers bringing their kids, right, during spring break of all times, which is, that one I'm mind boggled, but hey, to each their own. Yeah. Yeah.

I think we have to lean into it. When you already have a reputation, you can't go out there and spend a bunch of money and try to change that. We need to lean into it. When we go into the outdoor realm, and I'm tipping my hand a little bit, I do want to go Girls Gone Wild, but Girls Gone Wild, fishing, duck hunting, right? Lean into it and make a joke of it and do it a different way.

And to see the structured plan with this really is encouraging. I mean, I'm the one that's always advocated, of course, to family, family, family. and to lean away from this, but to use the, your point is really well made in that it's, use what we got.

Great, I am looking for approval today to spend $35,000 on this program, and I've asked Mr. Hart not to vote because he's got a conflict on this one.

Mr. Hancock.

Yeah, I have a question. Oh. The blue buzz, Andy Hancock, the blue bars on the graph that showed there was an increase in March business, is there any breakdown of where that came from? Who are those customers? And it's been increasing because we've obviously been pushing family spring break. I've got nothing against the collegiate thing at all. But the family spring break has been increasing. So what's the breakdown on that blue bar that is increasing? And how are we going to lean into that versus, I'll say it because it's a tough subject. The spring break is linked to negative publicity. And we don't want that. I still get people who say, we don't come down to spring break because it's too wild. That's not a big case anymore. We're getting a lot more families here. Because I say, come in March. There's nobody here. All the spring break action is at the north end of the island. Go for it, buddy. There's nobody here. And I've got pictures to prove it from year on year on year. So what's that blue bar made of that's been increasing That's an important thing to know before you start trying to lean into collegiate again. I don't know.

I mean, the collegiate thing is fine. Just for the record, what she's talking about doing also, keep in mind, is aside from all the other funds and other the family and other spring break activity and money that we're already putting in that's in the budget. So it's not just doing this. Now going back to your point, what I've noticed in just kind of my own taking reservations, one of the differences for March for me, and I can't speak for everybody, is that we have found where we have winter Texans, we have more winter Texans staying the month of March. We've had more families coming in, and we've had spring breakers. When I've gone out to the beach in front of, let's say, Saida Towers during spring break, it's actually a really good mix between families and spring breakers, and everybody has been, on that end, has been very respectful. It's not a matter of super loud music. Everybody just seems to just be enjoying themselves at the beach. And so I think there is enough business as long as we're casting a big enough net for everybody to enjoy themselves. Cause we also have properties that don't allow spring breakers or 25 and over. And so that's where we have a lot of families stay or winter Texans stay. So I think that graph of where you're seeing it, it's not just one collective group. that we're marketing to that's seeing a rise in it, it's just we're now starting to cast, instead of just doing spring breakers, now we're doing winter Texans, families, and spring breakers.

But that's my point about the breakdown. Unless we know what that breakdown is and how can we possibly target something that's going to increase that March number, we need the breakdown on that blue bar to show us what's working. And that also leads into the next discussion about strategy and how the marketing is spent to go after the people we're already successful with. I agree with you. That mix is what we've got now. Yes, I see exactly the same as you see. But where's that blue bar go? It's been going up.

Let me help. So the blue bar is actually tax collections, and so that's going to be obviously from the different properties here. The other way we skinned that and the way that we decided where we were going to go is we took our arrival information. That arrival information is if we've served you an ad and God forbid you open that ad and looked at it and then you showed up on the island, we know what ad you saw and how long it took you between the time you saw the ad until you came. So when we sat down to decide what states we were going to look at and how we were going to draw, we looked at who's already coming. They're coming from Minnesota, they're coming from Illinois, they're coming from Kansas City, and they're coming from New York. That was the information that we took. They won't say to us, in March you all saw this many families, this many singles. What they can say to us is geographically, this is where people came from, and we know that because of their cell phones that they're holding onto. And then we have another bar that says, because you had your cell phone, we know that you're between 34 and 50. We know that you make between $75,000 and $150,000. It's just demographic information. So if we look in that pool that we have, we know that we want to increase people coming from Chicago and we've got it. We want to increase people from Minneapolis and that we've got it. And those are gonna be the sub-indicators that we look at in addition to the hotel tax. Is the hotel tax going up? And if the hotel tax is going up, is it going up in those destinations where we just laid down this money? And when they hit that social media ad, then we've got them and we know if they come into destination. Does that make sense?

Yes. Sean, I know you keep coming up.

Go ahead. The only other issue that comes to me is the coexistence, as Luis started to point out. Between the family that's trying to get their kids to sleep, the next door you've got the collegiate spring break, and then the next. I mean, that's an SDR and a hotel problem, but that's something, too, that I think we probably need to spend some thought into and how to help these people coexist when they're here.

Agreed.

I think it's helping guide them. Tell them where the family-friendly places, which are the more party, I guess, driven locations. That may be one way of doing it. I mean, I know the... I don't think the water park opens anymore. The indoor park used to open for Schlitterbahn, and I know... people would send them over there, right? I was at the water park during that time, so I remember we were getting people saying like, oh, well, East La Grande went ahead and sent us over here because maybe you guys are better fit for our family, right? And East La Grande, because we're doing pool parties and we're... having the beach events and all that stuff, and it's a less family-friendly environment now. We have the families basically acknowledge that that's going to be the environment that they're in and that they're okay with it. We have them sign off on that. This is what we're having. This is what we're doing. You know, you're okay with it, or if not, we'd be more than glad to refund your money and help you get a room somewhere else. But we usually try to pre-warn people about that as well, because we know our environment. And like I said, some people decide to stay, some people don't. I think it's just making it easy to where maybe the island does provide a, hey, these are family-friendly locations, and these are spring regular collegiate locations or events.

Just to respond to that, Brian, before you jump on. Cindy, I think we should add to the website a category that allows for family-friendly. We're not going to say the other. We're just going to simply say, or adults only.

Yeah.

There you go. And then the other thing we discovered the other day in talking to some of our friends in the fishing community, we need to identify your short-term rentals that have boat slips. And we need to have that on the website.

The only thing I was going to say is I've actually had more families that are that are more understanding during spring break, it's actually during the summer but I've had actually complaints of the neighbors making noise because they're not anticipating it or it's coming out of left field. Where spring break, if they know that they're staying at, let's say again, Saida, they know that there's going to be spring breakers there. So they already kind of go in with a little bit of knowledge that there might be, where I've had more problems or issues is actually during the summertime where it's like, hey, this isn't spring break. Why do I have noise or music or anything? And it's happened to different properties just because it's a little more unexpected. But people are partying and drinking and staying up late and playing loud music during the summer, probably almost on a more of a consistent basis than spring break. But I mean, valid point. I mean, I think, again, it comes down to communication and knowledge and sharing it out to prep the guests that are coming.

I think a lot of these college students are very respectful towards families and they mix really well with them. I really, I mean, I do get quite a mix of them. So I think it almost feels like the summer other than for us, we're doing pool parties, but it almost feels like the summer during those two weeks.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it creates a good energy, have some dynamic going there. You don't always want to be in the party. Sometimes just watching it is fun. I do have one more agenda item. And so if we've exhausted this item and you're in agreement, I would ask for a vote to approve the $35,000 spend.

Is there a motion?

Motion to approve.

Second. Discussion? Everybody's questions have been answered thus far? Okay, very good. All in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you very much. Five-five, discussion regarding visit South Potter Island strategic planning efforts for tourism development on the island.

Great. This is really a precursor to a larger discussion. Thank you to Mr. Goodman for asking us to bring this forward. The way that municipalities work is that the city always has a comp plan, a comprehensive plan, This is a plan that was created that should go to 2050. I included the piece that's about tourism and business in your packet already, and I really don't wanna go over this. I would like you all to look at it so that you can see.

52 pages of it, yes.

Well, just the pieces that are about tourism, because I think that when you read it, you'll see that there's a lot of the things that you have continued to advocate for that were being advocated for at that time. For example, outdoor recreation activities, branding South Padre Island as an outdoor fisherman's paradise, windsurfers' paradise, that's there. The idea to lean into the airports, that's there. The idea to diversify your target markets, that's there. I do agree with what Mr. Hancock has said today. We've got some big long-term visions, and in order to get to that long-term vision, we gotta break it down and talk about an action plan every year. Where are we gonna get this year from here to there? Some of the things that we've committed to doing this year that will get us from here to there is that we're leaning in with the fishing community. We are buying ads for fishing and outdoor recreation like we've never done. We're about to convene a working group of our fishing organizations here on the island. We're going to the Houston Fishing Show, which is the single largest fishing show in Texas and gets 100,000 people. We're sharing a booth with Ron Hoover. This year and next year we hope to have our own end cap At the fishing show so that's one set of activity this activity that you all just talked about Leaning into our spring break will be one leaning into our winter break will be another one Leaning into short-term rentals Tom and I went to a workshop that talked about how people are how Convention and visitors bureaus are working with their short-term rental partners and everybody's kind of struggling with it and so Tom and I agreed that we would lean into it and I'd like to do a marketing program this year that focuses on family traditions doing that in a house as opposed to a hotel getting the family together for an experience you've seen some of these VRBO commercials maybe, where they're talking about bringing your friends together and all of that is around a short-term rental unit as opposed to a hotel, just so we can begin to cultivate some more of that business. The way that I have always worked and I have found it to be successful is that we talk about areas that we want to be vested in. You all have been very focused on the marketing and that's good, but we got to have some product development. We got to do some other... We've got to do some other things to grow our industry. And so I really want to push you to move out of discussions just about the marketing and into the discussions about with the resources that we have or the connectivity we have to other organizations, how can we lift it? When I first got here, one of the things I was talking to you all about is we don't have a food... Besides Wine for Wishes, who we're putting money behind, we as a community on the farthest south of Texas with some of the best fishing in the state don't have a gourmet food item that we identify with, an event that we do. We need to do something with culinary and with food as well. So how I wanted to start, let me go back. So then we need a long-term vision. Then we need a mid-term vision. What is it that you want to achieve over the next three to five years? When we're sitting here in three years, and I've been here for three years, and you can say, gosh, Kelly, you've done a great job. What have we, what is that mark? that we're looking for. And is it infrastructure? Is it indicators? Is it tax collection? Where you decide that you want to put your energy and your effort, we will make a movement. We will move the needle. But you've got to decide where you want to move the needle on and what we're going to do that on. When I came here to be with you all and I went around interviewing, not one person could say to me what they thought South Padre could or would be in five to 10 years. No one. And if we don't hold that vision here, then we can't get there. And then once we have that vision, absolutely, we've got to be held accountable and benchmark against where we're going. And that's why I said to you, you know, with the convention center, this is how I'd like to benchmark it. And with this program for the spring activations, I'll come back and we'll benchmark that as well. How much money are we putting in and how much effort and results are we getting out of it? But you all here need to think about, and this is just to begin with, where is the level of effort that you want in the next three years? And ideally, it's got to fit into this comprehensive plan, things that they've already identified. And I think that'll be easy. So your homework is to read this plan by the next time you get here so that we can have a conversation in a mid-range, what do you want to focus on?

Kelly, thank you so much for putting us on here. And yes, I mean, absolutely. You talk about getting from here to there. The question is, we don't know where there is.

Correct.

And that's what we're trying to identify here. We're trying to identify what it is. The ecotourism, we've got that one we've got to deal with.

The committee, go ahead. Money allocated.

Yeah, we got that we got to deal with. But we've got, you know, there's so much happening in Cameron County right now alone. It's just insane that we don't determine what our history, what our future looks like ourselves. And if we don't, then it'll just happen the way that it happens and we end up with some messes. And so, no, it's absolutely got to be able to say that this is who we are and what we want to become. And you're right, the question you asked is exactly right. Where do you see us in three to five years? And none of us could really answer that question.

How would you respond to that, Tom?

South Padre Island is a first-class destination. I don't see us as a world-class destination. I see us as a playground for... all of Texas, I see us as a place that offers the opportunity to easily come down, spend some money, be with your family, be with your group of Greeks or Baptists, it doesn't matter, and then be able to come, be comfortable, easily organize yourselves, and we've talked about trying to better, the number one thing searched on the website are things to do.

Itineraries, yeah.

put their itineraries together. We can excel at that. We really can jump out ahead. The other thing that we can really jump out ahead of is the short-term rental market. I know that's me on the soapbox again, but in the convention and visitor business, we don't have a hotel next to the convention center, and we don't look like we're projecting to have one right there next to it. So what's the next thing we do? We're a bleasure market. We come down, all the government want to come here because it's the beach. So why not take advantage of what we have, which is the accommodations that put people right on the beach front, and in a comfortable situation with others, with their families, or whatever it is. We've not cracked that nut yet. We've not been able to go to a convention meeting and say, hey, come down here and take advantage of the short-term vacation rentals in addition to the hotels. And once we do that, because also we're looking at another how many miles of development is going to happen up north and what's taking place. We've got to factor that into what's happening as well. I'll say this publicly right now. Anybody who's going out there to build condominiums or whatever it is on the beachfront up there, come talk to us in the short-term vacation rental business. We'll tell you how to build it. I'll pay to furnish the unit, and you can earn income before you sell a cotton-picking unit. And that's a huge, huge market. People today, more and more, are, why buy a place, particularly when you can go to a different place in the world every year and spend less money? I mean, that's the kind of stuff that the short-term vacation rental markets, and that's the kind of stuff that we can excel at because we've been doing it for 40 years already. And we just need to draw that picture better.

All right, well, we have homework. And Tom, can you do my homework for me, please?

You all do that homework. I'll bring together a plan for this year so that you can see how we would structure every year's plan, and we can build off that then to talk about what three-year goals would be and the areas that you want. Because when you say to me what your areas of priority are, be that short-term rentals, be that gourmet food bringing, recognition to Sal Padre Island again as a first class destination in Texas. That's where we'll put our money back behind and we need to be consistent for a couple of years to move the needle then.

Very good, anything else for Kelly?

Go ahead. On the sheet of paper, it says, core questions for community engagement. What must South Padre Island protect? Obviously, our beaches. That's the number one draw. What needs to change? We need a strategy. You've been talking about vision again. It's not a strategy. It's not a marketing strategy. The marketing strategy has to be defined in order that you need to... So you know where you're going to achieve results year on year to get to the big end game, to get to the Super Bowl, right?

I'm sorry, Andy. You've said that a couple of times. We do have a marketing plan. That marketing plan is defined by the markets that we seek, how much we've allocated to each one of them, what they're moving, where they are.

That's the island way, and that's results-based.

No, we presented three marketing plans. Greenhouse is one of the marketing plans that we presented and that's got strategy in it and it's building year upon year and we've made some tweaks to that. We've got the marketing agency that'll come back now and do the Mexico marketing piece of it. And then we showed the strategy that we have for the local RGV. And those markets are how much money are we going to spend in it? Who are we trying to move in that? Is it family? Is it locals? Is it athletes? And then we talk about the messaging that we've got behind that. And right now, it's really a value proposition that we're promoting, because you are such a good value. If that hasn't come through clearly, I think you could probably find the marketing plan on the website. And we can talk about that anytime you want.

But you've just mentioned three different streams. They're not together in a plan. They're not coordinated. They're just bing, bang, bong, bang, bing, bang.

That's not fair to say that they're not coordinated. We are.

I think that's incorrect, Andy.

Is it in one place where I can read it and see the breakdowns of the markets we're going to, the results we've had, a strategy that shows what's successful and what's not?

We go over the results every month. Every month we go through.

hotel revenue, I'm talking about marketing strategy. Hotel revenue is different.

No, we showed the level of engagement, we showed the number of impressions, we showed the click-through rate, we showed the spend, we showed the return on investment, and historically in marketing, those are sort of the indicators that we share with we can show increase in different geographic areas. If there's something in particular that you would like to, you've brought this up several times and I'd be delighted to sit down with you and go over some of that with you to see where you think we have gaps and to make sure that we're hitting what you're hoping for.

In these days of technology, why can't that report be online?

The marketing plan?

Mr. Hancock, Mr. Hancock, all of that information is available. It's presented to us here on a monthly basis, sometimes more often than that.

I would suggest that we send him the packets for the last four or five meetings.

We don't need to send him anything. It's all available on myspi.org.

It's all online. Why do you think I'm asking the questions? The whole point is a mishmash. We've got a bucket of potatoes and we keep smashing them up. There is no defined report or strategy moving forward with what's been successful, what's results-based, what's marketing-based, there's nothing.

Well, there is. There's huge amounts of data. There's huge amounts of data, but they're not collated, Tom. The problem is because there's huge amount of data, consolidating that into a form that can be easily understood by people is very difficult. And if that's what you're looking for, then, I mean, we've continued to talk about that. And they've taken, but there's huge amounts of data indicating that the success or lack of success. And just as we talked about this morning with Casey, I mean, some markets are working and some are not. We continually adjust. That's the amazing part about the digital these days is we can measure what's working and not and adjust. And that's exactly the conversation we had.

Rather than have hundreds of pages, why aren't we using technology to reduce this down to a more easy to understand format?

Thank you, Mr. Hancock. Your feedback has been well received. Is there anything else for Kelly? Hearing none, this meeting is adjourned. Thank you.

Thank you.