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Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau Director Brent DeRaad stands outside his Choctaw Stadium office, which has a view of the field. (O.K. Carter | Arlington Report)
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Though the people involved in Arlington’s vast (and so far, still growing) visitation industry pay a great deal of attention to the Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau, most of the rest of us do not.

That noted, it’s time for a brief catch-up. It’s a worthy topic if for no reason other than the convention and visitors bureau’s price tag and its impact: It has an annual budget of almost $11.7 million and a significant impact on the local economy. It’s also an employer, with 30 people on the payroll. The offices are in Choctaw Stadium, across the street from Globe Life Field.

How much impact? According to the visitors bureau, in a 2022 study, Arlington welcomed slightly more than 15 million visitors annually for ballgames, concerts, conventions, amusement parks, tractor pulls and more. The collective economic impact was significant. Those visitors spent an estimated $2.1 billion, although that’s calculated by the multiplier effect: Somebody makes a buck, they spend the buck, then again, then again. It should also be acknowledged that about 10 percent of Arlington’s jobs are tourism related. Yes, many of those are part-time gigs.

The number of visitors is also on the rise. The previous major impact study in 2017 put the critical numbers at 14.5 million visitors, who spent an estimated $1.4 billion annually. Back then, slightly more than half those visitors stayed overnight in Arlington, a trend of significant interest to the hotel industry and also a number the visitors bureau is always trying to expand.

Which brings us to this question: How does the visitors bureau work and where does its funding come from?

Though the city originally created the visitors bureau in 1972, it became a semiautonomous entity in 1992, funded primarily through hotel taxes, with its own board of directors made up mostly of people in the affected industries but with a City Council member or two also on the board. The key word is “semiautonomous.” It’s fair to say that what the City Council and city manager want, they get, since it’s the council that decides how hotel taxes are distributed.

The CEO of the visitors bureau is Brent DeRaad, 58, hired at the end of 2021 after stints with similar roles in Tucson and Scottsdale, plus an early career in public relations for the Fiesta Bowl. His office on the third floor of Choctaw offers one of the most interesting business suite views in Arlington. It’s a floor above the old Home Run Porch (right field), with a panoramic view of the playing field.

As a recent interview begins, the Birmingham Stallions — a UFL team in town for a playoff game — are just leaving the field after a practice session.

Choctaw hosts UFL football games, pro rugby, pro soccer, high school football and other events.

“Sometimes, I’ll see three or four teams practicing at different times during the day,” DeRaad said.

From the office, there’s also a view of the roof of what used to be the city-owned Arlington Convention Center just north of Choctaw, the promotion and leasing of which once was a visitors bureau responsibility. But no more. The building still belongs to the city but currently houses the Arlington Museum of Art and Esports Stadium, though the stadium part may be descriptively hyperbolic. It’s more like a giant room with video screens and state-of-the-art electronics designed to host giant gaming tournaments, some televised worldwide.

There’s still an Arlington Convention Center, but it’s run by the people at the new Loews Hotel a block west of Choctaw — all $550 million and 888 rooms of it.

DeRaad is quick to point out that the visitors bureau is actually three entities in one, sort of a catchall for the visitation industry. In addition to the visitors bureau, they are:

The Arlington Tourism Improvement District: A tourism public improvement district formed to promote and assist in building and sustaining hotel and tourism business for the city of Arlington. The tourism district conducts and enables activities that support this endeavor, including but not limited to sales and marketing programs. 

The tourism district is supported by a 2 percent assessment fee on net occupancy receipts from rooms that are subject to an occupancy tax on hotels within the city of Arlington that have 75 rooms or more.

The Travel and Sports Legacy Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization that connects the Arlington community with careers; tourism enterprises with talented people; and the tourism industry with a more sustainable and employable future. The foundation focuses on assisting youth and persons in underserved communities with educational attainment, financial support and career opportunities in travel, tourism and sports management and providing workforce solutions for tourism and sports industry stakeholders. The major collaboration groups include the University of Texas at  Arlington, TCC and the Arlington Independent School District.

DeRaad’s future focus? “Though hotel bookings overall are way up, we’d like for that 15.1 million number not to be a flat one, but with our seasonal attractions, we end up with a January-February problem, even though we’re technically open year-round.”

The answer? More conventions, corporate meetings and more traffic to the Entertainment District’s cultural offerings — think Arlington Museum of Art, the International Bowling Hall of Fame and what’s likely to be the big hitter in that group, the Medal of Honor Museum, scheduled to open in March 2025. There’s also the possibility that the state Legislature will legalize gambling, which could create all kinds of opportunities for the Entertainment District.

“I would hope within the next 10 years that we would have surpassed 20 million annual visitors,” DeRaad said. “I think that’s very realistic, especially based on continued growth within this Metroplex.”

O.K. Carter is a columnist at the Arlington Report. You may contact him at o.k.carter@arlingtonreport.org.