BY DAN HILDEBRAN
A contractor for Clay County Tourism said his agency is in serious talks to bring back the Pro Watercross Tour to Lake Geneva in 2025.
Alan Verlander of Airstream Ventures told the county’s Tourism Development Council on September 4 that his firm is talking to tour representatives about Keystone Heights hosting another race series.
The jet ski racing tour stopped at Lake Geneva in June 2023 for a two-day event and returned the following year.
Both tour stops were videotaped for later broadcasts on CBS Sports.
Verlander also said his firm was in talks to bring a fishing event to Clay County. The potential event could bring more tourism dollars to the Lake Region.
“We are working on Ozark fishing,” he said. “They are a big fishing organization. They would like to come to North Florida, so we are talking to them about the different parts within Clay County that they would fish. They’re big into crappie fishing, so that is their big thing. We’re just trying to figure out how many boats they would need, how many ramps we could do it in, those kinds of things. But we’ll get that event booked, I’m hoping, by the end of the year.”
In other news from the September 4 Clay County Tourist Development Council meeting,
Digital campaign delivers 2.9 impressions
Laura English of Advance Travel and Tourism described the county’s two digital marketing campaigns designed to drive traffic to ExploreClay.com. She said both campaigns recorded 2.92 million impressions and delivered more than 32,000 visitors to the website in June and July.
“The campaigns we put together for you guys accounted for about half of the website traffic at 60%,” English told the council. “Then these users directly drove over 27,000 page views when they were on the website, and then they performed 78,000 event actions on ExploreClay.com.”
She said the general leisure campaign targets people outside the county, and the “Hey, Neighbor” campaign is intended for Clay County residents.
English said that through a geo-fencing campaign, her firm traced 436 smartphones on which their owners clicked an ExploreClay. Com advertisement and then went to a Clay County destination.
Explore Clay app to feature Keystone Heights history tour
Product Development Manager Samantha Koster told council members that she has just launched a Green Cove Springs history tour on the county tourism’s mobile app and is now developing a similar product for Keystone Heights.
She said the Explore Clay app is a mobile version of the county’s tourism website.
“It has everything from events to restaurants and places to stay,” she said of the app. “The special feature is the tours section. We’ve started developing passports and itineraries that guide visitors to an even greater vacation when visiting Clay County.”
Koster added that one of the app’s most popular tours is “Caffeinated Clay,” which highlights the county’s coffee shops.
Bed tax revenues flat
Tourism Director Kimberly Morgan reported that bed tax revenues decreased in July by 9%, compared to July 2023, marking the third month in 2024 that tourism tax revenue decreased from the previous year.
Morgan said that based on her talks with industry experts at the Governor’s Conference on Tourism, the slump in tourism Florida has experienced over the past year and the county has seen in the last quarter is a stabilization of the industry after the COVID-19 boom.
“They’re all saying this is the normalization,” Morgan said. “We had such a huge demand from COVID that it actually inflated our rate and our occupancy so much that we didn’t know what normal was anymore. And so now that we’re starting with everyone getting back to a normal way of life, we’re starting to see those rates and that occupancy level actually normalize. So, we’re getting into that new normal, and we’ll be able to project growth from there.”
