Remember the Oklahoma Route 66 Passport created by the Oklahoma Department of Tourism a couple of years ago?
It turns out the agency distributed that little booklet by the truckload.
The department this week sent out a news release about the 2020 tourism season, during the first part of the COVID-19 pandemic. It contained this nugget:
Another of the department’s key initiatives in 2020 was the Oklahoma Route 66 Passport. Launched in August, the passport features 66 stops on Route 66 where travelers can get their passports stamp. The project was an immediate hit, with more than 29,000 ordered from TravelOK.com in 2020.
Naturally, this intrigued me, and I sent an email to the department of tourism asking for more details. David White, director of public information for Oklahoma Tourism, elaborated Wednesday:
“We printed an initial 50,000 Route 66 passports in August 2020. We had to reprint an additional 50,000 in the summer of 2021 and have just received an additional order this month of 75,000 more. We are thrilled with the response of the Passport program and look forward to continuing to highlight unique stops along Oklahoma’s portion of the Mother Road.”
More about the passport can be found here.
Oklahoma Tourism also produced an infographic about its Route 66 tourism efforts. A few excerpts:
- Oklahoma Tourism spent $92,672 in its Route 66 advertising campaign in 2020.
- It led to more than 77,000 orders for the agency’s Route 66 guide.
- It led to 32% growth in visits since 2019.
- It helped create $8.6 million in lodging revenue in 2020.
- It helped lead to 2.8 million trips on Route 66 from out-of-state visitors in 2020.
- For every $1 spent on marketing, Oklahoma earned $92 in lodging revenue.
More general Oklahoma tourism numbers from the news release:
Oklahoma brought in an estimated 17 million visitors in 2020, a 17% drop from the previous year, but the number was substantially less than the 34% drop in domestic travel that the United States endured. The state’s share of the domestic travel market increased to 1.9% of all domestic travel, up from 1.5% in 2019.
Visitors’ average trip spend in Oklahoma saw an even bigger increase. For 2020, it grew to $434 per night, up $91 from 2019’s $343 per-night spend. […]
The portion of travelers visiting the state for outdoor recreation was 13% in 2020 after being just 5% in 2019. Oklahoma State Parks saw record highs in visitation, drawing more than five million visitors from April to June of 2020 — an increase of over two million for those same months in 2019. […]
Out-of-state visitors accounted for 61% of the state’s total visitor volume; that number was up from 52% in 2019. Nearly 6.7 million Oklahoma residents traveled within the state. […]
TravelOK.com, the department’s official website, saw record-breaking traffic in 2020. The site had more than 5.6 million users for the year — up 36.3% — and 26.3 million page views, an increase of 40.7%. TravelOK.com saw an increase in in-state users, which was one of the department’s goals for the year. […]
The tourism industry was responsible for 92,450 jobs in Oklahoma in 2020, and it generated $569 million in state and local tax revenue.
The department’s outreach research was conducted by Dean Runyan Associates and Omnitrak Group Inc.
(Image courtesy of Oklahoma Tourism)