Q&A with Explore Evansville CEO Tom White
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In March, Tom White became president and CEO of Explore Evansville. He succeeded Alexis Berggren who stepped down last year after becoming general manager of the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority in North Carolina.
White spoke to Inside INdiana Business about his industry experience, his ties to Evansville and his goals as the new leader of the tourism organization.
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your background.
I spent the last 25-30 years in travel and tourism. Prior to here, I was working for Visit Mobile along the Gulf Coast in Alabama. I was the vice president of convention and leisure sales, over conventions and group tour sales and the marketing for all that market segment. I did that for a little over two years.
In Huntsville, I was the corporate marketing director for Yedla Hotel Management Company. Our corporate office was based in Huntsville. We had hotels throughout the Southeast, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama. I was helping do business development for them, trying to help those hotels recover from the COVID shutdown.
For a little over 20 years, I worked as the director of sales and outreach for the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, home of Space Camp in Huntsville, overseeing all sales, retail sales, special event sales, leisure sales, group sales. Anything that had a price tag.
What drew you to Explore Evansville?
I was familiar with Evansville in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I worked for Shoe Carnival. They’re based in Evansville, and they were a small retailer going through rapid growth during that time. It advanced my career as a young professional. So we came to Evansville quite often to the corporate office for business meetings and product development meetings.
I saw the [Explore Evansville] job posted somewhere, and because of my familiarity with Evansville, I went, “Oh, Evansville.” It brought back nostalgia. As I looked at the job, I kept thinking how that would be a great opportunity. I dug in and did a lot of research on what the situation was with Evansville and everything that had gone on because it had been many years since I had been here.
As I looked into it more and more, I got fascinated with the potential of Evansville as a tourist destination for meetings, conventions and sports. I told them I was interested, and next thing I know, I’m in Evansville.
What are your short-term goals in this role?
Being an outsider coming in, so to speak, I’m trying to get familiar with all the city and county leadership, all our partners and stakeholders, assessing what our offers are from our meeting and convention spaces to our sports tourism spaces to our leisure group tourism. Get familiar with the destination as a whole and then get an understanding of the day-to-day operations of Explore Evansville.
Then trying to figure out how we can have an immediate impact with future business coming in for the next six months, in that meeting convention role and sports tourism role. And then beyond that, giving good strategic direction on what tourism is.
I’m well connected on a regional, national level in our industry, being 25-30 years in this industry. I’ve seen a lot of other destinations and what they’ve had success in, and I hope to bring a lot of that experience I’ve learned over the years and apply it to what we’re doing here.
What are your long-term goals as president and CEO?
Continue to grow our sports tourism, which is our number one market segment of what we do here. We have some opportunities for some capital investment to increase our capabilities on top of what we’re already doing.
Our meetings and convention business is in a prime position to explode over the next three to five years. With my experience in that role, I can help guide the community that is involved in that role. That has an economic impact on an entire community. When people come in, they’re spending money in the hotels, restaurants and stores.
Long term, we also have the opportunity to grow tourism as a whole. The leisure tourism, the people who come to town for a day or a night or a few days for festivals, events, concerts and activities. And our group tourism, which doesn’t seem to have much in the market right now, we can slowly begin to grow that. Each segment will increase over the next three to five years, and that’ll push the overall tourism numbers up.
Tell me about Explore Evansville’s Tourism Master Plan.
In 2021, they wrote out a master plan of what they wanted to see, the Evansville tourism goal as a whole. It’s got a lot of details, and it’s what my strategic plan is based upon.
We have the ability, with our tourism and capital improvement funding, to expand our sports offering. For lack of better words, if you build it, they will come. What would be the things we would like to add to our community to give us an opportunity to bring in out-of-town teams to compete in sports? And our residents will benefit from these additional parks and studies.
We are regionally based in the middle of a lot of big cities: St. Louis, Indianapolis and Nashville. We can pull in a lot of regional conventions. Your dollar goes farther in our market. We can capitalize on that opportunity and have people come in and have a great experience at our destination.
What are your thoughts on enhancing destination marketing?
We’ve done a good job over the years here. We can start telling the story, “What is Evansville?” A lot of people know Evansville, but they don’t know much. We need to tell our story of who we are, the history of the community and the diversity of the community.
When people go to destinations, they like to go to the unique, local places. We’re going to start putting a lot of emphasis on that through social media and email marketing to showcase our uniqueness.
What about expanding visitor engagement?
It’s not just saying what we have and what we do, but creating some activities and things that people can do while they’re in our market to get them more engaged in what’s taking place. Whether it’s online or activities and things they can do that showcase some stuff that we have, like the Picasso exhibit at the Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science.
What about strengthening partnerships with local and regional stakeholders?
It takes everybody together. We’re all going to work together to accomplish our goal.
From our Old National Banks Events Plaza to the Ford Center to all the meeting spaces throughout the community, including within our hotels for our meetings and conventions. Our sports tourism as a whole and trying to give a diverse base of sports, from baseball to softball to lacrosse to soccer, expanding and trying to figure out how we can do more volleyball, more basketball within our community.
What do you think about the River Vision plan?
I agree that we should look at trying to figure out how we can expand the riverfront and activate the riverfront. The communities you see around the country that have engaged, active riverfronts have a huge economic impact on their community with tourism.
I noticed even when I first inquired about coming up here that it felt like we have a great riverfront. But how can we utilize it better to not only enhance our tourism and for our events and everything, but also the quality of life for the residents in the community?