Experience Fayetteville opens its tourism playbook
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Downtown Fayetteville. Photo: Travis Kersh/Experience Fayetteville
Experience Fayetteville for the first time this week is making its marketing and sales plan public, a move meant to make the city's tourism strategy more transparent.
Why it matters: Experience Fayetteville is funded by half of Fayetteville's 2% hotel, motel and restaurant tax — more than $5 million in recent years — and overseen by the city's Advertising and Promotion Commission.
State of play: The plan is organized around Fayetteville's 10-year Destination Master Plan, a roadmap for sustainable tourism growth, community alignment and destination development.
- It also sharpens the city's tourism identity around five core concepts: hospitality, nature, arts and culture, outdoor recreation and the University of Arkansas.
Follow the money: More than half of Experience Fayetteville's 2026 investments are aimed at destination marketing through advertising, PR and promotion. It targets driving-distance communities like Dallas/Fort Worth, Kansas City, Little Rock, Memphis, Oklahoma City and Tulsa.
- The strategy leans into paid media, creator partnerships, TikTok and Pinterest, email, student-athlete NIL partnerships and AI search optimization so the city shows up in AI-powered travel discovery.
- "Favoriteville" will turn trails, restaurants, breweries and local favorites into a "trail to retail" campaign; "Major in Fayetteville" will target fans for all seven Razorback home football games; and Restaurant Week will expand from seven to 10 days.
During slower seasons, Experience Fayetteville plans to beef up attention to meetings, sports events and group tours, with goals to grow hotel room-night production by 8% year-over-year.
Zoom out: Little Rock posts a tourism master plan, 2026 business plan and annual reports, while Bentonville is developing a destination master plan.
- Rogers and Springdale publish public tourism and A&P information, but not as detailed as Fayetteville's new playbook.
The bottom line: Fayetteville is trying to make tourism spending easier to track and defend.
- The next test is whether annual reports show the plan delivered measurable returns for residents and businesses.