COLLEGE STATION, Texas — While business is typically slow in the summer, when some 70,000 students leave campus, the city of College Station saw a boom in tourism thanks to the international Mexico versus Brazil soccer match over the weekend.
Bringing big summer events has always been a plan for the city’s tourism department to help the community.
Tourism Manager, Jeremiah Cook explained, “We understand that the local economy needs a little bit of a uplift on summertime and Christmas time the two times the students leave 70,000 people leave the economy and all of a sudden you have a gap to fill. Our hardest hit areas are in our retail and restaurants, but we heard from restaurants and hotels that saw folks and were super busy Saturday night.”
This weekend’s match blew everyone’s expectations out of the water and helped many industries.
“Our estimates prior had about $10 million in spending coming into the community and that was when we were looking somewhere around 70,000 people attending and the numbers are coming out at over 85,000 people coming to the match that weekend and I know those numbers definitely went up,” Cook said.
The match has brough an estimated over $21 million into the city and they’re buckling up again to host the George Strait concert at Kyle field this weekend.
Cooke continued, “We know 85,000 were in the stadium last weekend and looking to be over 100,000 plus for George strait this weekend and we just couldn’t be more excited to see these things come into fruition.”