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Kilgore is making progress in its quest to become a tourism destination in the heart of East Texas, according to the quarterly tourism report delivered recently to the city council.

Tourism Manager Megan Payne presented the findings to Kilgore, citing statistics and information collected by Visit Kilgore for 2024.

Major annual city events like Oktoberfest are attracting more visitors, Payne said, thanks to increased marketing efforts, as well as modifications to accommodate the needs of more visitors.

“Starting in 2022, we had around 3,100 (Oktoberfest visitors.) In 2023, we had 3,500 and in 2024, we had 4,400. So, we’re excited to see those numbers grow. We changed the layout this year and we’re happy to see that it’s continuing to grow. We’re expecting great numbers this year as well, with it being 10 years of Oktoberfest. We hope to see y’all downtown,” Payne said.

She added Visit Kilgore also logs demographic information about visitors to Oktoberfest, noting the typical visitors to the event are older, live in the East Texas area and usually have older children who live outside of the home.

“When we do our marketing this year, we can definitely market to the people that are already coming there, and also market to the people who have low numbers of attendance,” she said.

Payne said Kilgore continued to attract increased numbers of visitors as the 2024 holiday season progressed. She shared attendance figures from the 2024 Derrick Lighting ceremony, which drew 2,600 visitors in 2022, 2,700 in 2023 and shot up to 4,400 last year.

“We changed it to a Thursday instead of a Saturday,” Payne said, explaining the attendance jump.

“We did a lot of free children’s activities and we saw great results from this. It’s great that people want to come and celebrate Christmas. I know our merchants along North Kilgore Street greatly appreciated the traffic that they were getting on a Thursday night. We’re really excited to see these numbers continue to grow.”

From Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 of last year, there were about 1,084,000 trips made to Kilgore by individual people looking to shop, have fun and sometimes stay in local hotels. This figure was down 8% from 2023, Payne said, but the number of people booking rooms in local hotels for overnight stays went up more than 2%.

The top markets for Kilgore visitors come, somewhat expectedly, from Tyler, Longview, Lufkin, Dallas, Shreveport and other areas throughout and near Northeast Texas.

The two furthest markets which sent significant numbers of visitors to Kilgore were Monroe, Louisiana and Oklahoma City.

Payne attributed this increase in part to increased radio marketing efforts for the Texas Broadcast Museum in these two locations over the past year.

To learn more about Visit Kilgore’s marketing efforts and to see a local event schedule, visit https://visitkilgore.com/.