Spring fest crowd highlights tourism revival

Thursday, May 5, 2022

The annual events that designate the City of Norman as ‘the City of Festivals’ are slowly reviving with major turnouts, and as the economy gets better from the pandemic times, local leaders are finding out methods to further the image of this town as a destination for tourism.

The city and business leaders residing in Norman exchanged words on Monday with the local and national experts related to tourism and destination marketing to start National Travel and Tourism Week with a tourism luncheon, organized by VisitNorman at The Well.

Dan Schemm, VisitNorman executive director, explained that Norman is a financial development region within a community. This statement has been supported by the popularity of the events arranged last month.

“We’ve seen that just in the last couple of weeks with the Medieval Fair, which had a 183% increase over the 2019 numbers,” Schemm said.

Travel and tourism serve as drivers of the U.S. economy, as per the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Both of the sectors in 2019 generated $2.6 trillion in economic output and support one in 10 jobs.

To Oklahoma, travel is the third-largest industry, just after oil, gas and aerospace.

For Norman Music Festival, the rate of increase compared to 2019 is not yet decided, but Schemm said the event drew at least 100,000 people.

“There’s pent-up demand for travel, and I never thought I would be able to say we actually know what the value of that is because it stopped happening, but unfortunately, we got to experience that,” Schemm said.

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