Tourism Soars In Vidalia

mrandolphadvance@gmail.com

At the Vidalia City Council meeting on Monday, November 11, Vidalia Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Director Alexa Britton informed the council and attendees of the growing number of visitors to the Sweet Onion City, as she said that tourism had increased by over 300% since 2014.

“I really don’t think our community understands what kind of visitors we get at the [Vidalia Onion] museum,” Britton began. “We are up to 2,739 visitors from 45 states and 21 countries this year.”

Britton said this number of countries represented by international visitors was the most the museum had ever seen in a year, as the prior record was visitors from 17 countries. She shared the countries which had citizens visit the city, which included Canada, Denmark, Russia, Switzerland, Panama, China, Poland, Germany, South Africa, Peru, the Czech Republic, Brazil, the Netherlands, Sweden, Thailand, Costa Rica, Nigeria, India, Norway, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.

“I did some projections on the end of this [year’s totals] based on 2023, and our [number of] visitors are up 17% [from last year], our donations are up 27% [from last year], and gift shop sales are up 11% [from last year],” she emphasized. “Since 2014, our [number of] visitors are up 310%, donations are up 155%, and gift shop sales are up 168%. In 2014, we averaged 61 visitors per month; this year, we’re going to average over 250 visitors per month.”

Mayor Doug Roper commented on this growth. “That’s impressive, and it’s exactly why we want to relocate the museum to downtown,” he remarked. “That’s exactly why we want to remodel the old city hall and get the Downtown Vidalia Association, Vidalia Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the museum downtown because those thousands of visitors will then trickle out into retail shops and restaurants and will turn money over in our city.”

Currently, Britton is working alongside students at the Savannah College of Art and Design to design a new layout for the Vidalia Onion Museum, which will be used when the museum transitions into the new city hall. The exact date of this transition has not been determined.