A revised, sourced, and continuously updated edition of the Bella Vista Advertising & Promotion Commission’s
case for sustained tourism marketing — written for residents, business owners, and elected officials who want
to understand what the commission does, what it costs, and what the evidence actually says about its value.
This document is a living web page rather than a fixed print artifact. As new data becomes available and as
the regional tourism landscape evolves, the contents will be updated and a public change log will be maintained
at the bottom of the page.
In keeping with our commitment to honest, defensible communication with the public, this edition replaces
several specific economic claims from the 2025 edition with broader assertions grounded in third-party industry research
and clearly cited sources. The structure and conclusions of the paper remain the same; the evidentiary
foundation has been strengthened.
The Bella Vista Advertising and Promotion Commission (BVAP) is the only organization whose dedicated mission
is to attract visitors to Bella Vista. It operates on an annual budget of approximately $500,000 — a fraction of
what each of our neighboring cities spends — and it does so using funds collected exclusively from visitors,
not residents.
Between 2019 and 2024, the combined gross revenue from prepared food and lodging within Bella Vista
roughly doubled, growing from $18.6 million to $37.2 million. This figure includes both resident
and visitor spending and reflects multiple factors — population growth, regional economic expansion, the
short-term rental boom, and active tourism marketing among them. While BVAP cannot claim sole credit for this
growth, sustained destination promotion is a well-documented and significant contributor to outcomes of this
kind.1
≈ $500K
BVAP annual budget — funded entirely by visitor spending, not resident taxes
$18.6M → $37.2M
Combined food & lodging revenue, 2019–2024 (resident and visitor spending)
≈ 14%
BVAP’s budget as a share of comparable neighboring-city tourism budgets
Picture a family in Dallas planning their next outdoor vacation. They search online for “best mountain biking
destinations in Arkansas.” The results they see in that moment will heavily influence whether they book a
short-term rental in Bella Vista or drive past it on the way to a hotel in a neighboring city. This scenario
repeats thousands of times each year.
The Bella Vista Advertising and Promotion Commission exists to ensure Bella Vista appears in those search
results, travel articles, and social media feeds. The argument of this paper is straightforward: without
sustained, professional, dedicated destination marketing, a community with Bella Vista’s structural profile
— no chain hotels, a lodging economy spread across hundreds of individual short-term-rental owners,
competing against well-funded neighboring cities — becomes systematically harder for travelers to find.
This document does not argue that every dollar of growth in Bella Vista’s tourism economy over the past five
years is attributable to BVAP. It does not argue that BVAP is irreplaceable as a marketing function in
principle. It argues something narrower and more defensible: that some organization, with a dedicated
mission, sustained funding, and the structural capacity to act on Bella Vista’s behalf in regional and national
travel media, is necessary if Bella Vista is to remain visible to the visitors whose spending supports its
restaurants, its short-term-rental owners, and the tax base that benefits every resident.
BVAP operates under Arkansas state law, which enables municipalities to collect modest taxes on prepared food
and lodging and reinvest those funds in tourism promotion. In Bella Vista, this means a 1% tax on prepared
food (restaurant meals) and a 2% tax on short-term rentals.
These are pass-through taxes, functioning identically to sales taxes. When a visitor books a
short-term rental in Bella Vista, the booking platform automatically collects the 2% lodging tax and remits it
to BVAP. When a customer orders a meal, the restaurant’s point-of-sale system adds the 1% prepared-food tax to
the bill. Short-term-rental owners and restaurant operators never handle these funds — the money
flows directly from visitor to BVAP.
An important consequence
If the City Council eliminated these taxes tomorrow, short-term-rental owners would not gain an additional
penny — booking platforms would simply stop collecting the 2%. Restaurant owners would gain nothing — their
POS systems would stop adding the 1%. Residents would gain nothing — they don’t pay these taxes in the first
place. The only effect would be that the funding for Bella Vista’s tourism marketing would disappear.
This is the central structural fact of the funding model. Whatever one’s view on the relative merits of
tourism marketing, it is incorrect to characterize BVAP funding as a burden on residents or local businesses.
It is a transfer from visitors to the city’s promotional capacity.
BVAP’s mission is to promote Bella Vista as a destination. In practice this means:
Some communities default to their Chamber of Commerce for tourism marketing. This represents a structural
misunderstanding of the two organizational models.
Chambers operate on membership dues — businesses pay annual fees in exchange for networking, advocacy, and
limited marketing exposure. A meaningful portion of a typical chamber’s budget is spent on member recruitment
and retention. When chambers do marketing, it focuses on member businesses, not destination promotion.
The arithmetic illustrates the constraint. Bella Vista has roughly 300 businesses. If half of them joined a
local chamber at $500 annually — an optimistic assumption — the resulting $75,000 would barely fund a
single staff position. Even doubling participation and dues would not approach BVAP’s current operating
capacity. More fundamentally, chambers serve members, not markets: they are not structured to negotiate media
partnerships for destination coverage, to produce broadcast-quality video content, or to defend the city’s
brand identity in third-party publications.
Every day, Bella Vista competes for tourism attention against neighboring cities whose marketing budgets are
multiples of its own. The disparity is not subtle.
Fayetteville
$5.0M
Bentonville
$3.6M
Rogers
$1.5M
Bella Vista
$0.5M
Figures are publicly reported annual budgets and may vary year to year. Bella Vista’s budget represents approximately 10% of Fayetteville’s, 14% of Bentonville’s, and 33% of Rogers’.
Each neighboring city contains multiple chain hotels backed by corporate marketing departments and national
advertising programs. These hotels dominate search results through sustained SEO and paid-search investments
that an individual short-term-rental owner cannot match.
A typical Bella Vista short-term-rental owner might gross $30,000 to $50,000 in annual rental income, with a
realistic marketing budget of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per year. A single corporate hotel can
spend that amount on digital advertising in a single day. Pooled, professional destination marketing is the
only economically realistic way for Bella Vista’s distributed lodging supply to remain visible.
The good news is that Bella Vista has something its neighbors cannot replicate: a backcountry-recreation
experience inside a metropolitan region. Where Bentonville offers urban bike paths between shopping districts,
Bella Vista offers an integrated outdoor environment — tens of square miles of preserved forest, a
purpose-built trail system, lakes accessible to overnight guests, and short-term rentals within walking or
short-riding distance of trailheads. The marketing challenge is not the product. It is making the product
findable.
The case for sustained tourism marketing rests on three layers of evidence: local performance (what
has happened in Bella Vista), industry research (what destination-marketing research has consistently
found across hundreds of campaigns), and historical comparison (what happened in the one U.S.
jurisdiction that eliminated its tourism marketing entirely — addressed in Section 6).
Bella Vista’s combined food and lodging revenue grew from approximately $18.6 million in 2019 to approximately
$37.2 million in 2024. This figure represents the gross revenue of all restaurants and short-term-rental
operations in the city — it includes both visitor and resident spending, and reflects multiple drivers including
regional population growth, the broader short-term-rental boom across Northwest Arkansas, and active tourism
promotion. BVAP does not claim sole credit for this growth. We do claim that, in the context of
independent research on destination marketing effectiveness, sustained promotion is a meaningful contributor.
Longwoods International — the largest and longest-running independent tourism research firm in the United
States — has applied a peer-reviewed Advertising Effectiveness and ROI methodology to hundreds of destination
marketing campaigns since 1990.1 Their methodology uses control procedures
to isolate the incremental visitation produced by promotional activity from the other factors that influence
travel decisions (economy, weather, price). Across this body of research, properly-executed destination
marketing consistently produces a positive return on investment.
The U.S. Travel Association, drawing on Tourism Economics data, estimates that tax revenue generated by
domestic travel and tourism reduces the average American household’s annual tax burden by approximately
$1,200.2 In other words, the public services that residents enjoy —
roads, public safety, parks, schools — are partly paid for by visitors whose spending generates tax revenue.
Where tourism is reduced, that share of public-service funding has to come from somewhere else: typically,
residents.
What we are deliberately not claiming
We are not claiming a specific ROI multiple for BVAP’s spending. Single-organization ROI figures for
destination marketing are notoriously sensitive to attribution methodology and are easily challenged in
good faith. The defensible claim is the one made by decades of independent research: destination marketing,
done professionally and sustained over time, contributes meaningfully to visitor spending, tax revenue, and
regional economic activity.
Beyond the headline revenue figures, tourism activity contributes to the local economy in ways residents see
every day:
The relevant industry framing for this last point comes from the U.S. Travel Association and the Bureau of
Labor Statistics: travel and tourism is one of the largest service industries in the United States and a
significant employer in destination communities of every size.2
Speculating about what would happen if Bella Vista eliminated its tourism marketing function is unnecessary,
because the natural experiment has already been run. In 1993, Colorado became the only American state to
eliminate its tourism marketing budget entirely. The results have been independently documented for more than
thirty years.
Independent Case Study · Longwoods International / Destinations International
Following a 1992 constitutional amendment requiring new taxes to be approved by voters, Colorado’s
short-term tourism tax was not renewed in 1993. The state’s $12 million annual tourism marketing budget
went to zero overnight.
Within two years, Colorado’s share of domestic tourism had fallen by an estimated 30%, representing an
estimated $1.4 billion in annual lost visitor revenue. By the late 1990s, Longwoods
estimated the annual revenue loss had grown to roughly $2.4 billion. In the summer
resort segment specifically, Colorado fell from first place among U.S. states to seventeenth.
Industry-led efforts to replace the public funding with voluntary private contributions during this
period were, in Longwoods’ assessment, of little impact — the contributions were neither mandatory nor
coordinated. Funding for state tourism marketing was restored in 2000, after which Colorado’s market
share gradually recovered.
$12M → $0
Colorado’s state tourism marketing budget in 1993
−30%
Loss of domestic tourism market share within two years
~$2B / yr
Estimated peak annual lost visitor revenue before funding was restored
Sources: Dr. Bill Siegel / Longwoods International,
“The Rise and Fall of Colorado Tourism”;
Destinations International,
“What Happens When You Stop Marketing?”;
The Colorado Sun, August 2024.3
The Colorado case is the cleanest natural experiment available on this question. It is published, peer-reviewed,
independently replicated, and decades old — which is to say, it is the gold standard of evidence on what
happens when a jurisdiction eliminates its dedicated tourism promotion function.
The scale of Colorado’s experience is obviously not directly comparable to Bella Vista’s. But the structural
finding is consistent across every Longwoods study that has followed: destination visibility, once lost, is
very expensive to rebuild. The market share that disappears in two years is not recovered in two years
after funding is restored.
“What happens when you cut a destination’s marketing budget to zero? This is a question few of our clients
would dare to ask. In 1993, however, one of them did.”
Longwoods International · The Rise and Fall of Colorado Tourism
For Bella Vista’s short-term-rental owners, BVAP functions as a pooled marketing infrastructure that no
individual owner could replicate. Walk through nearly any Bella Vista listing on Airbnb or VRBO, and the
property names reference the trails, the lakes, the outdoor experience — “Trail’s End Retreat,” “Bike Haven
Bella Vista,” “Ozark Trail House.” These names acknowledge what drives the rental economy.
The commission provides what individual owners cannot achieve alone:
Restaurant operators in destination communities consistently report that out-of-town visitors spend differently
than residents — longer dwell times, larger parties, more multi-course orders. Industry research and
destination-economic studies have documented this pattern in many comparable communities.4
The specific share of restaurant revenue derived from visitors in any given destination varies considerably
by season, by restaurant type, and by year — but the directional finding is consistent: in destinations with
sustained visitor traffic, restaurants benefit from a visitor revenue stream that smooths seasonal volatility
and supports the breadth and quality of the local dining scene.
BVAP supports this through:
For residents, BVAP’s contribution extends beyond direct economic metrics to community vitality.
In today’s travel landscape, visual content is the primary driver of destination consideration. Independent
research consistently finds that travelers heavily rely on online video and social content to inform
destination decisions: industry sources cite figures in the range of 60–70% of travelers reporting that
online video has influenced their choice of destination, with travel-related videos producing materially
higher engagement than text or static imagery.5
BVAP’s content strategy is built around this reality, with:
Event sponsorship is not about logo placement. It is about negotiating contractual marketing rights that
convert a one-time event into ongoing destination visibility — with accurate location attribution, dedicated
landing pages, and integrated content that follows the event audience long after the event ends.
Bella Vista is positioned within the Northwest Arkansas tourism corridor as the region’s authentic backcountry
experience — where nature comes first and adventure begins at the doorstep. Maintaining that distinct
identity requires active management. Without it, the city’s assets are easily attributed in regional and
national media to the larger, better-known cities nearby. The case studies in the next section illustrate why
this matters.
Case Study 1 · Brand Attribution
Case Study 2 · Visitor Conversion
Case Study 3 · Strategic Partnership
The shared lesson across all three case studies is the same: in a region where Bella Vista’s assets can easily be
attributed to better-known neighbors, the ongoing cost of not defending the city’s identity in media is
not zero. It is the cumulative cost of every visitor who chose a hotel in another city because they did not
realize what was actually here.
Crucially, eliminating BVAP does not return money to residents or business owners. The pass-through taxes
that fund the commission are paid by visitors at the point of transaction. If those taxes are eliminated:
This distinguishes tourism-promotion taxes from other government revenue. Property-tax reductions return money
to property owners. Income-tax cuts increase take-home pay. Eliminating pass-through tourism taxes provides
zero financial benefit to anyone in Bella Vista — it simply removes the destination-marketing capacity that
those visitor-paid taxes fund.
Northwest Arkansas is one of the fastest-growing regions in the United States. Bella Vista, positioned at the
heart of this growth corridor, will not remain untouched by the regional dynamics. The question is not whether
growth will come; it is what kind of growth will shape Bella Vista’s future.
Bella Vista was founded as a recreational community by people with vision — individuals who saw potential in
the natural landscape and imagined a different kind of development. They created lakes, preserved forests, and
built with intention. That DNA remains embedded in Bella Vista’s character, but it requires active cultivation
to survive the pressures of rapid regional growth.
The commission’s role in this cultivation is meaningful. By promoting Bella Vista’s outdoor recreation assets
and distinctive lifestyle, BVAP helps attract people who already value these things. Visitors who become
residents, entrepreneurs who become investors, and developers who discover the community through tourism
arrive already understanding and appreciating what makes Bella Vista distinct. They are more likely to propose
projects that enhance the community than projects that simply extract from it.
Without active promotion of Bella Vista’s character and values, growth still arrives — but it arrives without
a filter. Investors and developers who have never experienced the trails, never understood the balance between
nature and neighborhood, make decisions on profit margins alone. The pattern is visible across America in
communities that failed to actively tell their stories: they got growth, but they lost the character that made
them valuable in the first place.
Tourism marketing, in this framing, is not about accelerating growth. It is about curating the kind of
growth that arrives.
This document is intended as a living, public-facing brief on the Bella Vista A&P Commission’s
activities and the broader evidence supporting professional destination marketing. The sources below
represent the third-party industry research and case material referenced above. Where local-level figures
are reported (such as Bella Vista revenue growth), they are drawn from publicly-available city financial
records and BVAP’s own reporting; methodology notes follow.
Local revenue figures (2019–2024). The $18.6M and $37.2M figures represent gross combined
prepared-food and lodging revenue collected through the city’s A&P remittance process. This figure includes
both visitor and resident spending and reflects multiple drivers beyond BVAP’s marketing activity
(population growth, regional economic expansion, the broader short-term-rental boom). We make no claim of
sole attribution.
Comparative marketing budgets. Figures for Bentonville, Fayetteville, and Rogers are
based on publicly-reported budgets and may vary year to year. They are presented as directional
comparisons of relative scale, not as precise current-year figures.
ROI framing. We have deliberately moved away from publishing a single Bella Vista-specific
ROI multiple in this edition. Single-organization destination-marketing ROI figures depend heavily on
attribution methodology and are easily challenged when not produced through a rigorous third-party
study. The directional evidence on professional destination marketing’s return is well-established by
Longwoods International and other peer-reviewed researchers across hundreds of campaigns.
Sources, methodology, and figures will be updated as new research is published and as the Commission’s
annual reporting becomes available. Readers who identify errors, outdated figures, or sources we should
consider adding are encouraged to contact us directly.
This document is intended to be the most accurate, up-to-date, and transparent public summary of what the
Bella Vista A&P Commission does and why. If you see something that needs to be revised, we want to hear from you.