Virginia tourism hits $35.1B record spending in 2024

Virginia’s tourism industry generated $35.1 billion in visitor spending in 2024, achieving a record, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Tuesday.

That’s a 5.4% increase over the $33.3 billion visitors spent in 2023, and well over the pre-pandemic visitor spending of $29.1 billion in 2019.

Additionally, the Virginia Tourism Corp.‘s annual Economic Impact of Travel study for 2024 reported that Virginia had 44.7 million overnight visitors last year, an increase of more than 1 million people from 2023.

“I think Virginia tourism is healthy and going in the right direction,” Candace Fitch, the Feiertag Professor of Practice in Hospitality Leadership at Virginia Tech, said after reviewing the study Tuesday.

Virginia is attractive to tourists, according to Fitch, because the commonwealth offers a lot of different types of experiences.

“If you want to go to the beach, you go to the beach,” she said. “If you want to go to the mountains, you go to the mountains. If you want to go to the city, you go to the city.”

Travelers spent $96 million per day in Virginia in 2024. In 2023, they spent $91 million per day.

Fitch pointed out that out of the $35.1 billion in visitor spending in Virginia in 2024, transportation accounted for $10.4 billion or 30%.

“Virginia has so many different options for airports,” she said. “We also have so many interstates. There are so many driving options, [including] scenic routes.”

Visitors to Virginia generated $2.5 billion in state and local tax revenue last year, an increase of $100 million over 2023.

“This unprecedented level of economic activity not only supports hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs and strengthens local businesses, but it also generates crucial state and local tax revenues that help ease the tax burden for Virginia families,” Youngkin said in a news release.

The tourism industry in Virginia directly supported over 229,000 jobs in 2024, an increase of nearly 5,000 jobs since 2023.

Nearly all lodging employment, 26% of recreation employment and 25% of food and beverage jobs in 2024 were supported by visitor spending, according to the study.

The Tourism Economics group within Oxford Economics, an United Kingdom-based economic advisory firm, provided the economic impact data to VTC. A visitor, for the purpose of the research, is someone who stayed overnight or traveled more than 50 miles.