Tennessee's tourism department put out its 2025 numbers this month, and the short version is this: we're not just growing, we're growing at nearly twice the pace of the rest of the country. I think that's worth understanding, not just celebrating.
The state pulled in a record $32.5 billion in direct visitor spending last year, up 2.7% from the year before — a growth rate that outpaced the national average of 1.9%. Zoom out further and it's even more striking: tourism spending here has grown 40% since 2018, nearly double the national growth rate of 22% over that same stretch.
That's not a state riding someone else's coattails. That's Tennessee, and places like ours in particular, pulling more than its share of weight.
A few numbers that stood out to me:
Last fall, when the federal government shut down, national parks all over the country closed their gates. Except one. For forty days, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park stayed open, because a coalition of state, local, nonprofit, and tribal partners came together and made sure it did. More than 2.4 million people still got to walk through these mountains during that stretch, at a time when almost nowhere else in the country offered that same chance.
I think that story explains part of why these numbers look the way they do. When it mattered, the people here didn't wait around for somebody else to fix it. They just did what needed doing. That's not something you can measure directly in a spending report, but I'd bet it shows up in the numbers anyway.
Buried in that report is a line I don't think gets enough attention: compared to the national norm, visitors to Tennessee spend more on shopping and dining, particularly at locally owned businesses and unique, independent restaurants. Folks aren't coming here for the same chain experience they could get anywhere. They're coming here for what's actually here — and they're spending accordingly.
That's the same instinct behind every project we build. We don't bring in outside management to run things from somewhere else, and we don't build the same cabin you'd find in any other market with the name changed. We build what fits this place, run by people who live here, because that's what the data — and honestly, common sense — says works.
A record year is nice to see, but what I actually pay attention to is the pattern underneath it. This is a state, and a corner of it especially, where tourism keeps growing faster than the national average, where the tax base keeps expanding because of it, and where — when push came to shove last fall — the people here showed they'd rather solve the problem themselves than watch the doors close.
I don't think that's a coincidence. I think it's the reason this market has held up as well as it has, and it's exactly the kind of place I want to keep building in.
If you'd like to talk through what this means for a specific project, my team's happy to sit down with you.
— Austin Williams, CEO, Compass
Sources:
