The Golden Triangle had a busy and economically successful weekend.
Hotels in Columbus filled up over the weekend as two different sports competitions came to town. Two hundred ninety tennis players and their families came for the 2016 USTA Southern Adult 65 & Over Mississippi Championship, a three-day tennis championship for seniors.
Nancy Carpenter, executive director of the Columbus-Lowndes Convention and Visitors Bureau, estimated that around 600 people in all attended the event.
Carpenter estimated that about 2,500 people were at the Columbus Soccer Complex over the weekend for the Mississippi Soccer Association North District Tournament on Saturday and Sunday. Carpenter said 46 district teams competed.
Carpenter pointed out that having so many people staying in hotels and eating at restaurants in Columbus and the Golden Triangle is good for the city’s economy, though she said she did not yet have exact monetary figures.
“You could bring 10,000 people to town for an afternoon and it wouldn’t mean as much as having that many people stay overnight and eating in the restaurants and the hotels,” she said. “It has been a huge weekend for us … and we had so many positive comments from the people from other cities.”
Carpenter added that the weekend also served as good preparation for the President’s Cup Soccer Tournament May 13-15, which Carpenter estimated will bring in about 5000 people.
Jennifer Gregory, the chief of executive officer with Greater Starkville Development Partnership, told The Dispatch hotels in Starkville were at maximum capacity and restaurant-goers waited multiple hours for tables during Super Bulldog Weekend, the annual spring event put on by Mississippi State University.
The university hosted multiple sporting events, including a Bulldog team scrimmage football and MSU baseball games.
Gregory estimated that 40,000 people attended the games.
The Cotton District Arts Festival on Saturday in Starkville also had a crowd of around 40,000, according to the Starkville Area Arts Council. Gregory said the festival included 18 food vendors and 123 arts vendors.
“Super Bulldog Weekend and the Cotton District Arts Festival are two of our community’s largest and most attended events,” Gregory said. “They are not always on the same weekend, but having them on the same weekend provides a really excellent opportunity for us to showcase the Starkville community to a wide variety of visitors, both returning visitors and new visitors.”
Though there were locals and out-of-towners that almost certainly attended both the arts festival and the university’s sporting events, it was still a huge weekend for the city, Gregory said. She compared it to weekends with home football games, which result in about $615,000 in sales taxes and a total output of $13.3 million.
The Columbus Pilgrimage was recently held in Columbus from Mar. 28-Apr. 9. Carpenter said the first weekend in April, hotels in Columbus saw a 69 percent increase in revenue on the first day and a 64 percent increase in revenue on the second day. Overall, attendance to and revenue from Pilgrimage increased by 20 percent from last year, Carpenter said at a CVB board meeting Monday.
“Pilgrimage continues to be an event that brings in more overnight guests than any festival that we have,” Carpenter said. “And it does it consistently for more than 10 days.”
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