With friendly proprietors, carefully curated inventories and exemplary personal service, small businesses are truly the heart of any community. Not just in Billings, but across the country, those businesses depend on tourism dollars to survive.
“Tourism is such an important economic driver,” said Aly Eggart, executive director of Visit Billings. “So many of the businesses that we frequent and enjoy as locals thrive in large part because of visitors to our city and the money they’re spending while they’re here.”
That money adds up to $621 million a year flowing through the Billings economy, ultimately benefiting small businesses and supporting local jobs, according to Visit Billings.
“Coffee shops, breweries, outfitters, climbing gyms … these are the kinds of small businesses that make a city unique,” Eggart said. “More than that, though, our people are what make our story, and interaction with those people is what visitors usually go home remembering.”
Visit Billings has always prioritized the promotion of small business partners, an effort that’s valuable for establishments that may not have a great deal of money to spend on their own marketing. The dollars generated by tourism filter into tangible quality-of-life results for residents by offsetting infrastructure costs and strengthening the local tax base.
Big businesses pay attention to tourism when making decisions about where to locate.
“A stable economy is a strong indicator of a community’s overall health,” Eggart said. “At Visit Billings, we want to keep finding ways to inject new dollars into our economy as often as possible.”
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