Mississippi Leads the Nation in Tourism Recovery
Interest in traveling to Mississippi is 68% higher than before the coronavirus pandemic. Robust statewide tourism investment and a flurry of marketing campaigns land the state No. 1 in the country for travel recovery. Interest in travel is still down an average of 20% nationwide over 2019, and state programs throughout the country are replicating Mississippi’s incredible success.
Our Most Interesting Findings
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- Mississippi has recovered 112% more pre-pandemic travel interest than the national average.
- Interest in visiting small-town Mississippi has nearly doubled from 2019 and is up five-fold in one town.
- It’s not all sunshine and rainbows — Mississippi has only recovered half its local tourism (staycation) interest compared to the national average.
We obtained travel-related search data for the 210 U.S. metros tracked by Google Trends, a tool that analyzes the popularity of top Google search queries. An analysis of local tourism (staycation) and domestic/international travel searches reveals interest in visiting Mississippi is recovering the fastest in the nation. However, local tourism interest is down in every Mississippi metro.
What’s Happening
Mississippi is heavily dependent on tourism — its fourth-largest industry — and suffered $2.6 billion in economic losses from the pandemic. But state legislature has responded quickly, investing extensively in tourism recovery using coronavirus rescue package funds that catapulted the state beyond the rest of the country. By September 2021, The Magnolia State led the nation in tourism recovery, according to the U.S. Travel Association and Tourism Economics.
Not all of Mississippi’s success attributes to the state legislature; destination marketing organizations and industry partners are just as creditable. Leaning on its historically rich rural culture, tourism leaders in the state launched a barrage of advertisements in early 2020 and 2021, offering socially distant, outdoorsy, culturally immersive experiences.
Mississippi had a 19% increase in tourism tax revenue in 2021 over 2020, according to the Mississippi Development Authority. Even more, the state brought in slightly more tourism tax revenue last year over 2019 — a sign of post-pandemic recovery. Our findings back this report; domestic and international interest in visiting the state is higher in four of Mississippi’s six designated market areas. Tourism has rebounded in more of the state’s metros than anywhere else in the country.
But, Locally?
Although Mississippi boasts impressive domestic and international tourism recovery, the state’s local tourism economy is lagging considerably behind the national average. Local tourism interest fell sharply along the Mississippi River in the South, where COVID cases were high in the second half of 2021, and local tourism interest is down for every Mississippi metro in our analysis. Out-of-state visitors are the primary targets of the state’s marketing campaigns, explaining in part why Mississippi is basking in domestic and international travel growth while sitting on a depressed local tourism economy.
One outlier is Hattiesburg, MS — local tourism is only down 6% compared to 2019, two and a half times better than the state average. The city also stands out for its tourism campaigns, emphasizing the message “Safely Open for You.” Hub City attractions match the desires of pandemic-era travelers: rural, culturally rich and expansive outdoor recreational opportunities. The city kept a stable local tourism economy due to its highly successful pandemic-aware campaigns that promote social distancing and cleanliness.
Similarities and Differences
Like most U.S. cities, tourism in Mississippi is rebounding faster in rural areas, evident in the 400% global tourism search popularity increase for small-town Greenville, MS. Meanwhile, the state capitol, Jackson, MS, is still down 34% compared to 2019. Coastal areas in the state are also down, providing an opportunity for secluded beach travel to already ordinarily quiet destinations like Gulfport, MS.
Domestic and international travel is the core of Mississippi’s tourism industry, but the state still took a unique approach to recovery. While most of the nation was promoting staycations, The Magnolia State leaned hard on welcoming out-of-state visitors. The state’s quick pivot allowed it to recoup so much domestic and international travel interest that it more than made up its loss in local tourism, therefore, landing itself the state with the most recovered cities in the nation.
This analysis is part of a more extensive nationwide study of recovering local, domestic and international interest in tourism as measured by travel-related Google searches in 210 U.S. cities. Read the full report here:
US Tourism Interest is Slowly Recovering, but Several Cities Surge Over 250%
Methodology
We created this article’s visualizations and analysis from a list of the 210 U.S. designated market areas tracked by Google Trends to compare travel interest, July-Dec 2019 to 2021. We broke our study into two sections, (1) Measure local tourism (staycation) interest in these areas and (2) Measure U.S. domestic and international travel interest in visiting these cities.
We used the popular search phrase “things to do” to gauge interest for both sections. The search keyword “things to do near me” allowed us to gain a peripheral view of local tourism interest within each metro using the interest by region feature of Google Trends. Then, we analyzed global searches for keywords, “things to do in [city]” to gauge domestic and international interest in visiting each of the 210 metros using the interest over time feature.
We used a control word to gather data for the 210 domestic and international queries to scale all results identically. The control word is more popular than any single keyword search but not so popular that locations with less popularity normalize to zero. Our control word was “learn to fly.” Naturally, it varied in favor between 2019 and 2021, so we scaled the averages of 2019 to 2021 to perform a direct comparison.
Our local tourism analysis is based on the 210 U.S. designated market areas (DMAs), also known as media markets, that define TV and radio territory in the country. The 210 DMAs cover the entire U.S. To avoid longtail metro keywords in our domestic and international analysis, we used the most populous city in each DMA for each “things to do in [city]” query.
Google Trends calculates popularity by region and interest over time using a scale of 0 to 100. A score of 100 is the area or time a keyword was most popular as a proportion of total searches in that area or timeline. A recovering city has a higher proportion of searches for our keyword in 2021 over 2019, not a higher absolute query count. Google Trends bases its data on a random sample of searches representative of all Google searches. It does not use every search made during a specified query timeframe — providing the whole data set would be too large to process. Therefore, it is possible to obtain varying results for the same query. To combat this, we ran all of our searches twice on different days and averaged the results to attain higher accuracy. We exported all data for this project between 2/10/22-2/11/22.
We obtained city population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.
You can download our Google Trends analysis in its entirety (from Google Drive) here.
Excel, Flourish, Tableau and Google Trends were the tools used to analyze and create data visualizations for this article.
