The I Love CVille Show With Jerry Miller! - Travis Wilburn Joined Jerry Miller Live On The I Love CVille Show!

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

The I Love CVille Show headlines: Interview With Entrepreneur Travis Wilburn Travis Owns Stay Charlottesville & Other Companies What Other Companies Do You Own, Travis? Travis Manages South Street Inn + 400 W High St The 100 Collection – Tell Us About This Business Characterize The Health Of Downtown Mall Now Local Government’s Role With CVille Economy Are CACVB Marketing Dollars Put To Best Use? CVille Vs Other Virginia Travel Destinations Travis Wilburn, Cofounder & Managing Partner at Stay Charlottesville, joined Jerry Miller live on The I Love CVille Show! The I Love CVille Show airs live Monday – Friday from 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm on The I Love CVille Network. Watch and listen to The I Love CVille Show on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, iTunes, Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Fountain, Amazon Music, Audible, Rumble and iLoveCVille.com.

Good Tuesday afternoon, guys. I'm Jerry Miller. Thank you kindly for joining us on the I Love Seville show. Very much looking forward to today's program. Travis Wilburn, our featured guest for the next 45 minutes to hour. And today's show, I think, is going to offer you, the viewer and listener, tremendous insight on what is going on in Charlottesville, Elmira County, and in Central Virginia from a tourism standpoint, from a hospitality standpoint, from a lodging standpoint, from a local economy standpoint, from an entrepreneurship standpoint. We have in the studio today a man that has built multiple companies from the ground up, bootstrapped those companies from the start into, frankly speaking, behemoths right now. And behind the scenes, this gentleman, Travis Wilburn, is a significant heavy hitter in the Charlottesville, Albemarle, and Central

Virginia ecosystems. It may not be front and center like some of the other guests that we have on the program, like some of the elected officials we have on the show. But please, hear me out here. This guy right here behind the scenes is moving a lot of the strings, whether serving on the CACVB at one time, whether having, frankly speaking, and I'm going to get the exact number from him, I don't know how many of doors that folks can rent from him from a lodging standpoint. And now managing the South Street Inn. We're going to show you renderings. Some of the vision that Travis Wilburn has for a boutique setting of maybe second to none proportions in the city.

Judah Wickauer is behind the camera. My friend, if you can go to the studio camera and then a two-shot as we welcome Travis Wilburn to the program. I'm excited for the show. I remember when you and I first met nearly 20 years ago, which is crazy. We're fathers now, family men now. 20 years ago, we were single guys, often on the downtown mall. We were both running discount deal sites. I think yours was called Seville Saver.

Mine was called Catch My Fire. And I was like, I knew then, we were certainly a competitor at the time, but I knew then I'm like, dude, this guy's going to crush it. This guy clearly gets it. He was at one time, the closer for the Seville Weekly when they tried to have, when they had a big fish on the hook and Bill Chapman and his team wanted to get the deal done. Travis Wilbur would go in there and close the deal as head of business development and now a serial entrepreneur. My friend, thank you for joining us. And the second part is introduce yourself to the viewers and listeners watching the show.

Well, thank you for all that. That's absolutely amazing. I'd say the key word, one of those things, is behind the scenes. It's always been fun to be behind the scenes. I've done a lot of shows in the vacation rental space and a lot of different stages. And I have to say, a little bit more nervous now than ever. You've created a huge following. And as you said, we've both come a long way. But I moved here in 2000 to help out some family.

Went to school here. And one of the little known things is proud college dropout. Got suckered out of school and started a couple different things, headed up development over at Seville Weekly and moved downtown over off of Ridge Street back in 2005. Still live in the same house to this day. Built one of the first guest houses to some degree in Charlottesville, renting out nightly and just one thing's kind of led to another. And Charlottesville has been one of the most beautiful cities by all means. I've lived here longer than anywhere else. Same, same. A lot of similarities here. How about the entrepreneurial journey?

State Charlottesville, the 100 collection, bootstrapping businesses. I mean, I'll start open-ended. Where would you like to begin on this journey we call entrepreneurship? Oh, wow. I mean, it's, I don't, you know, one of the, I guess it starts in like 2007. I mean, there's a, you know, a couple of other stories, you know, odds and ends, but I built a guest house back in the day and put it behind, you know, my house, borrowed a bunch of money that I didn't think I'd ever be able to pay back. But I built it because I had a mother who I thought was going to end up needing it. And she ended up not needing it. And I was like, well, I got to figure out how to pay for this. And those are the old days, man. That was, there was no Airbnb. There was no, I mean,

Vrbo existed, but nobody knew what it was. HomeAway or FlipKey. There was a local company called collegeweekends.com. And so anyways, I just started renting it out nightly with a credit card processing machine right next to my couch. I was like, this is pretty cool. I'm like, I'm meeting a lot of interesting people. It was just fun. And that's 2008, 9, 10 during the collapse.

Thankfully, I had a job doing business development at Seville Weekly. But it was that little extra income that literally actually helped me get through the downturn of the economy by all means. And so that's where it all started. 2010, I was going on jobs with Bill Chapman. For those that don't know, Bill is the guy that started Seville Weekly back in the day with Hawes and one other gentleman. And we were just talking about the success of the guest house. It was really kind of a collaborative idea that I was working for him. I was like, well, we should turn this into a company.

And I'm like, well, let's give it a shot. But I work for you. And so thankfully I had a paycheck but uh it was born in um 2010 really launched in January of 2011 and about that same time which you've kind of mentioned hopefully most people have forgotten but you keep bringing it up yes I had a local deal site I thought it was great the deal site dude we were you were crushing it I was beating Groupon yeah LivingSocial at the time. And, I mean, we had some really, really cool things, but it was a trend.

It was a trend, yep. And so we were thankful that we were able to exit successfully, but we kept the vacation rolling company in. That ended up being, I had no idea what I was doing. Literally none. I was like, sure, we're going to build a marketing platform. And one of the things I quickly realized is building the marketing platform. You know, as I mentioned in 08, there might have been five properties on a company like Verbo,

which everybody knows what that is now, but nobody then. And by 2010, there might have been 20 properties. And by 2011, there was probably 20, maybe 30 properties on Vrbo. And you had to pay to play to get listings, meaning that you had basically four different levels of listing. You had gold, silver, and lead, or whatever it might be. And gold was very expensive. And I was like, I've got to figure out how to be able to get in front of the consumer quicker and better.

And so it was in 2012 that I met Keith Woodard for the first time. And I was like, hey, man, I've got an idea for your building. Keith Woodard of Woodard Properties, right? Yeah. Yeah, because there's two Keith Woodards locally. This is the one. It is. Yeah, there's the one of Woodard Properties.

Okay. What's funny is there's two Keith Woodards, and they both do business together. Exactly. One's from Virginia Beach. One's local. Now Woodard Properties is run by Anthony Woodard, his son. Yep, absolutely. So Keith and I got together, and we did Old Metropolitan Hall, which was designed to do large rehearsal dinners.

We knew that people were coming downtown, visiting, and they wanted to experience, you know, the lively energy of our downtown on a Friday night, and then they were going to go off to a vineyard on a Saturday to go get married, you know, speaking. And so we did an old Metropolitan Hall, opened it in, I think, February of 2013, a couple months behind schedule, which was probably the most stressful three months of my life.

But, you know, we just started building marketing platforms, essentially, and really trying to deliver businesses. And so that's kind of how the journey got started that most people know about today. This guy, in a lot of ways, and I'm not just saying this because he's sitting across from me, has the Midas touch. A lot of what he has touched has turned into business success. We're going to unpack that on the show. We're also going to highlight some of the plans he has for the South Street Inn with some visualizations, some renderings that Judah has. I'll call for those in a couple of minutes, J-Dubs. We're going to talk data, foot traffic on the downtown mall. We'll talk tourism spend for the CACVB. What is that? The Charlottesville Alamaro Convention and Visitors Bureau.

That data, those numbers in comparison to some other jurisdictions. We'll compare and contrast Charlottesville as a tourism destination with some other destinations in the Commonwealth. And we'll talk frank conversations of what's driving the economy locally and what local government is doing well and maybe what local government should be doing better when it comes to our economy first stay charlottesville open-ended then i'll have some pointed questions highlight stay charlottesville for the community yeah um the let's see here so i mean stay charlottesville is a big i mean i guess the probably the first thing and most important thing to know is State Strollsville is a vacation rental marketing platform. We get a huge amount of website traffic that comes into our platform.

And what we do is we curate great properties from all around central Virginia and put that on the platform. At the end of the day, not only to best serve the guest, but as well as the owners that we represent. And so, you know, in the larger scale, they're generally referenced as vacation road management groups. There's over 17,000 of those companies in the United States. There's some other companies here in central Virginia. We've been fortunate enough that we knew a lot about driving market share. So the better way to ask that, you know, it's like a lot of people really just say, hey, aren't you like an Airbnb company? I'm like, well, no, I have to go to explain. I'm like, we are this. Airbnb is the same thing to me as kayak is to Delta.

Delta has its own booking platform where most of the traffic comes from, and then they fill up the back seats or the middle seat with the reservations from Kayak or Expedia. We do the exact same thing. So Airbnb is a platform that we utilize, or Vrbo or some other companies, but St. Charlottesville is actually a direct booking platform to be able to deliver really great guest experiences and opportunities to the owners that we represent. The 100 Collection. Oh, wow. This is – dude, I sincerely mean this.

I've been so impressed with what you've done here. Old Metropolitan Hall has had an incredibly positive impact on the mall. He was the man behind Charlottesville Insider, which was in a lot of ways an elevated tourist center, tourist check-in point. I want to talk about that here. But first, the 100 collection, Travis Wilburn, the who, what, when, where, why. Oh, wow. You went to the Grand Skelts. So there's a lot of confusion. When I ask a consumer if they were going to go look for an awesome local experience in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for a vacation rental, I ask them how they would find it.

Most of them would say Airbnb. And I was like, well, what is the guarantee that that's going to be a good experience? And they're like, well, I read the reviews and I cross my fingers and I hope. And I'm like, well, that stinks. And that's been eroding a lot of trust in the vacation rental space. A huge amount of trust, especially over the last four years. Been a lot of frustration. And then if I ask that same consumer, like, have you ever eaten at a Michelin star restaurant? They say yes. And then I ask them, great, what's the name of it? And they can't remember. And so what we're doing is we're going across the country, and we're looking for the people that best represent the communities that they live in.

They have to be very involved. They have to be, and I just think of this, I just posted about it on LinkedIn. One of our partners in Red Rocks just raised over $111,000 for some great causes for some kids. But very community-focused. They represent community well. They have their finger on the pulse. And then we look at the properties that they represent, the portfolio, the properties that are delivering a hundred percent. And then we put them into a curated guide within our platform. And so I think we're in a little over 75 destinations right now across North America. We're in the Caribbean, Bahamas, Canada, Mexico. And, um,

we've been really well received. It's kind of like this David and Goliath story. Um, I mean, we're up against billion dollar companies within that space. A lot of people don't remember this, but, um, you know, in 2010 and 11, uh, hotels and airlines were losing their market share to OTAs, online travel agencies. Kayak was filling up 50% of the plane, essentially, for Delta, and Delta was freaking out, or the hotels were freaking out. They were freaking out because they were losing margin. Go ahead. Market share and margin. It was getting more expensive.

It started off at 5%, then it went to 10% then it went to 15 and they're like we've got to do something different and there was actually another entrepreneur here adam healy that started a company called hotelicopter that then became room key which was six large hotel brands gigantic brands that were also freaking out adam healy killed it he exited he was the co-founder of borrowed and blue that didn't play out how he wanted. We'll leave it at that. Adam Healy, a tech entrepreneur, advisor, now living a cosmopolitan, well-traveled life with a beautiful partner.

I think that's fair to say. Absolutely. Yeah. No, yeah. He's living the dream right now. And he's off to, you know, once a founder, always a founder. Exactly. He started another company.

But the exact same thing that happened in the hotel and airline space is the exact same thing that's happened in the vacation rental space. And so what we did is we built the 100 Collection purely out of frustration. It's like, how do you find these local people that you trust and these experiences? And so people that we get to talk to, they either get it or they don't. And then we help the consumer at the end of the day book directly with those platforms because what people don't realize is those same properties that are on outpost website in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for, you know, X number of dollars a night are usually two to two and a half or whatever more on Airbnb or Vrbo, these other platforms. And so delivering you a

better experience and getting you directly in touch with the local brand. Um, that's what we do with a hundred collection. It's, it's impressive, dude. It is so impressive. What's also impressive. And here's a perfect time. Wait for me to call up the renderings for the South street. And this news, um, we talked about last week on the show, you're looking at Travis Wilburn, the new manager of the South Street Inn next to South Street Brewery. He's got big plans for this boutique hotel that has, I think, massive upside. Why don't you give us the who, what, when, where, why on South Street Inn? And when you're ready, you just have to say, Judah, put these renderings on screen, and then the viewers and listeners can be looking at what you are describing on screen.

Sure. Well, yeah, Judah, go ahead and put the renderings up. But I think one of the things that just explain of what's going on on a national scale is that a lot of these larger or beautiful properties, these historic properties have been mom and pop operated for a long time. They've had a lot of difficulty during COVID. They haven't been able to update. Generally in the hotel space, a company just like Boar's Head updated a couple of years ago. You have to update every seven years to stay fresh. And that's complicated. It's expensive. And we see properties all the time that actually need that and so while we do not own it we're just a management company you know the the folks that did get that they saw

that opportunity and now you know modernizing that property to best serve the consumer of Charlottesville so it will I think the really cool part about it is is that a guest will be able to book it for their and have an entire private event, have a dinner, have a pool lounge this close to the downtown mall, which I think is great. We've got a lot of properties just like that, but not to that size and scale. And so we're aiming to open that in May of this coming year. And so still waiting on a couple of permits. Do we want to highlight that at all?

Well, I definitely want a permit from the, if anybody's listening from the zoning department, we can take that building permit for the pool. But we've got a cool pool that our partners are adding that I think will add significant value. A little bit of touch up on the paint and modernization will go a long way. And so very exciting project.

We're very excited to have been chosen to be able to manage it. And we hope that we can just deliver phenomenal experiences there. And so we'll do it. We're working on the model, but I still think during the week there'll be some opportunities to rent it and get it by the room, but largely over the weekend we foresee that a lot of wedding parties and family reunions and larger groups should be hopefully getting any experience. Viewers and listeners, if you have questions, put them in the feed. I'll relay them live on air. Number one in the family, Deep Throat's got a good question for you on Airbnb,

which we will get to in a matter of moments. I'm curious of a lot of stuff here. You're the perfect guy to ask this question for. In the last six months, we've had significant movement in the hotel and lodging space. We saw the Cork Hotel trade hands in a significant deal. We saw the graduate on the UVA corner, transition management. We saw Jeff Levine, the Big Apple developer, with plans to build a hotel literally in the shadows of the Omni on the downtown mall. The Omni completely remodeled itself.

It looks fantastic in there. You are a player in this space here with, what, not just the South Street Inn, but what is it, 400 East High, 400 West High Street? Yeah, 400 West High. We also had other partners that ended up renovating that and improving it or updating it. And then we just had a new property, 707 East Jefferson Street, which used to be a business office that they were unable to rent. They were converting that back into lodging, and so that just came online as well i mean he he is

a perfect guy to get this question here some folks think we're over hoteled in this market a lot of folks say the complete opposite what is the actual answer it's such a difficult there's no one-size-fits-all by any means answer here but I think the most important thing to understand that is very significant right now is that the tour spends 4X what the local resident does. And so if we just look at the downtown mall as an example, and we, you know, pre-COVID, if you wanted to go eat on the downtown mall and have lunch, you better be there at 1155 or you were not getting a seat.

Now you can walk to a restaurant at 12 o'clock, 1215, 1230. You can have whatever seat you want to. Um, that's great if you want to grab lunch, but that's not great for the person that operates that. However, on the weekend, directly on Friday, about 12 o'clock, those things start coming alive again. Um, and they're being supported largely by tourism dollars. And so what I would argue is we need a great combination of both.

We need density. We need more lodging for residents of Charlottesville by all means. We are way, way, way behind where we need to be and just simply you know if you think about the last residential pot project that was built in charlottesville of high density that you could buy locally within a couple blocks the last one i can remember is the gleason building and that was done in what 2012 or 13 that's where acac is located downtown, guys. Yeah. And that's a problem, a huge problem. And the lodging from a hotel, we need those people. I mean, the cool thing about a tourist dollar is our government has three different ways to make money.

It has inflation, taxation, and economic output. And the second largest driver to our economy right now is tourism. The number one is defense spending. And I don't know anybody in local government that really has a huge impact on it. 1.3 billion defense spending, a data that was backed by a study commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce, Albemarle County government and Charlottesville City government found the defense sector had a $1.3 billion impact on our economy. Second, just under $1 billion was tourism, probably in the third slot is real estate. Frankly, if we quantified the impact of the University of Virginia from

an economy standpoint, it would be clear cut number one, but we don't have those data points yet. Keep going, Travis. Well, so i mean it's just the the cool thing about the tourists is that's how we get our teachers paid better that's how we get our firefighters our police um that's how we improve our schools those people come in you don't have to build anything for them they leave um and they help support uh our local residents in ways that we often don't see and we don't recognize. And so that's where it's like, hey, you know, historically, the downtown mall has been one of the top four most visited spots in Charlottesville. University of Virginia, by all means, is number one.

Monticello, vineyards, breweries, downtown mall. And so we've got to make sure that, you know, these areas are getting the right people in the right mix of people, I would argue. How do you quantify the health of the downtown mall today? It's in the worst shape we've ever seen. I've been here in 24 years. He's been here 25 years in August for me. He's approaching quarter century here, if not a quarter century already.

I've never seen the downtown mall in worse shape than, than it is right now. Well, I think the, you know, I think there's a lot of, a lot of different issues and from a lot of different lenses, but, um, you know, at the end of the day, what I've done is I've walked down and gone to every single business for the most part, shook in the owner's hand, asked them how they're doing, and they're struggling. There's three businesses that no one's covered yet that are looking at moving. There's a lot of active right now. Yeah. Okay. Um, and they're quietly begging for help. Um, they've been doing that. And so, you know, it's, uh, you have people, some of those same businesses that were here in the 90s that helped bring back the downtown mall. And they're struggling. You're seeing, you know, I think it's very public.

There's a coffee shop, Cafe Grit. They're moving one block away to get off of the mall due to safety. And some people might say, wow, that's a problem. Well, guess what? I go and get my coffee every single morning. He's got a grit cup. From Cafe Grit.

I sat at the counter. They're moving to the old clock building, the old Waterbird Spirits location, Hunter Craig's spot on Water Street, away from York Place to Water Street. Yeah. And they're doing it purely to take care of their baristas. And that's,

you know, that might sound extreme or what have you, but here's the fact I've literally stopped the barista from getting killed multiple different times from people that have walked in there that might be drinking or what have you, or have mental health issues. It's a problem, but they want to be there,

but they're like, Hey, we know that if we move a block away, we're not going to end up having to deal with that. That's sad. We've got to figure out how to be compassionate for all people by all means, but it's like also make sure that we're taking care of, you know, some of, you know, our workers. And so I'd say that that's probably my number one concern that I hear over and over and over again is the I've experienced it myself with my own staff. I opened up the Charlottesville Insider offices on the downtown mall with one person, and immediately, 24 hours later, they needed to because of safety issues.

So we're reorganizing and changing the way that we operate there. But I think we've got to figure out how to solve it, by all means. Erin King, watching the program, she helped open Commonwealth Sky Bar to tremendous levels of success. Now one of the key people at Feast. Carol Thorpe, thank you for watching the program. Fantastic broker, Gary Palmer on the show. Kid Ashey, who is the most prolific restaurateur in Charlottesville right now. Monsoon, Coconuts, Pineapples watching the program right now.

Lisa Custolo. You've got Supervisor Mike Pruitt watching the program. I see two city councilors, three boards of supervisors watching right now. Tom Powell, the founder of the Toy Lift on the show as we speak. I've been trying to solve or banter, discuss the equation of offering a hand up, not a handout to our houseless population. Hand up, showing empathy and compassion for our houseless population, while driving home the point that the 200 to 300 that are houseless in our community

should not be aggregating around the most important eight blocks in a 300,000 person region, which is downtown Charlottesville. I was extremely excited about the low barrier shelter that was coming to Cherry Avenue in the old Salvation Army thrift store location. I was disheartened to find out last week that Major Mark Van Meter of the local Salvation Army spoke out of turn when he said that the low barrier shelter could happen on Cherry Avenue. He then spoke with the higher ups with Salvation Army National, who said, no, you can't do that. You cannot run a low barrier shelter. You have to check IDs. You have to

maintain sobriety. There could be no drug abuse, no alcohol abuse. There could be no convicted child, you know, whatever the word is, you know, and you can't do it. So now the low barrier shelter is completely in purgatory or in the wind here. I'm going to ask you a very tough question. How the heck do we manage the – and I catch flack for using the word manage. But how do we manage the houseless population around downtown Charlottesville where it does not crush the small business owners that you and I try to champion every single day? I think, you know, this is a quite a complicated, quite a complicated situation. However, I don't think it's okay that 15 people

last night had to sleep on the downtown mall. I'm not okay with that. I think as a city, I think we should have the funds and we need to be able to figure this out so that we can give people housing. I realize that one of the arguments I've heard is that we don't want to attract people. However, guess what? We are. And so I use myself as an example. I had recently just literally just happened to me. Still have my guest house. The way that the guests parked their vehicle the other night, I couldn't plow the driveway.

And I apologized the next morning to the guests and said, you know, hey, thank you so much. I'm glad you're here. And they're like, well, we love it. It's our first time that we've stayed here. We usually stay on the mall, but we will not be staying there anymore. We've stayed with you with State Charleston. I was like, well, why? And they don't feel safe because they were

harassed over and over again, you know, in the evening when there's not a lot of traffic on the mall. That's just a really real fact. And I don't know that we can solve that overnight, um, outside of creating better policies that actually help make people feel safe. Um, however, you know, there are policies that, um, if I have a sign in front of my venue at old metropolitan hall and it's five inches outside of the the right way it's like i can get a fine however i have a gentleman that sometimes will be out there with his dog his mat his food uh he'll literally litter all over the mall and nothing has been done and that is absolutely not okay now does he have a right to. Now, does he have a right to

be there? Absolutely. Does he have a right to litter and trash the downtown mall, destroy the plants that other people have to go take care of? I'm absolutely 100% not aligned with that. I think that we need to figure out how to better be able to police that and move people along if that is what they're doing. And we know exactly who some of those people are. 100%. And so I think we've seen some, by all means, we've seen some real improvements. And I'll just say real quick, like huge fan of our police chief. Love Chief Cotches.

Yeah. He watches the show. Love it. I mean, the guy's a great guy. He practice, um, what he preaches and most importantly, his staff absolutely loves him. And I, you know, that's one of the things I always look for in any of our leadership is I don't really care who the leader is. I care what your people think about you. And, um, I go and see these officers on a regular basis and I ask them exactly what they think.

And when they have respect, I know that those are people that can actually help make good changes. Local government's role here. Two spots up for grabs on city council. Brian Pinkston and Juan Diego Wade, the mayor and vice mayor, are seeking re-election. City council and local government. Sam Sanders, over a year now on the job as city manager, their role with what's happening in downtown Charlottesville, two-pronged question, their role with the local economy and driving it forward and helping potentially jumpstart it,

and what are, frankly speaking, some sectors of business locally that are struggling right now? Well, I'd say what I want to see and what I want to understand is what is our plan? What is the plan? What is the plan to help bring people back, to improve the local economy? And is this a five-month plan, a seven-month plan, two-year plan? What is the plan? And I am very not aware of it. I am a big fan of Brian. I'm a big fan of Juan. I think they're great people. I think they've done a really good job of bringing the city council to an ability to function, and they are doing a great job listening. We do need to know what we're going to be doing.

I'm also a big fan of Sam. I think he's a great guy. But I think one of the things that people don't realize is our city government is no different than the way a corporation is set up. You have a CEO and you have a board. And the board is generally the largest shareholders and they dictate the policy of the CEO.

And so the CEO is not able to do much unless the board is in alignment. And so that's exactly the way our government operates. And so, you know, I would love to know what the plan is so that Sam is able to take action. I see him moving around. I see him put his finger on the pulse. And he's surrounded himself by some really, really great people that I have a huge amount of respect for. I like seeing what's happening.

We're going to need to be able to expedite some things a lot faster because I do believe this coming year might be a little bit worse than last year. I think, dude, I'm in 1,000% agreement with everything I've heard from this guy here. He's got his pulse with what's going on. I also am concerned with this year versus last year as well. We can unpack why before we do, are, were you able to get any of those data

points on tourism spending by chance on those, that, that deck though you were able to get those two pages. Oh, fantastic. So he's got, is it Travis, pages 17 and 18 from that? Yeah, sure. Why don't we, can we queue up page 17? And maybe, Travis, you could have that in front of you. And then as kind of like a play-by-play, if this was a football game, you could kind of run play-by-play on what we're looking at at page 17 here with the who, what, when, where, why.

Do you have 17 on screen? All right, look at the screen, viewers and listeners. Travis, you take over the show here on page 17. Oh, goodness. Well, so I think one of the things just to set up is one of the other things that we've pulled. We have done a lot of research, pulled a lot of data, a lot of facts. And I think it's really important to understand that in 2017, we had 3. half million visitors on the downtown mall via their cell phone. We geo-fenced the downtown mall from Market Street to Water Street. 3.5 million. And in 2023, we had about 2.4 million. And in 2024, it looks like we had roughly about 2.4 million.

So the data that was presented by Greer, who's going to be in here tomorrow, of Friends of Seville, was data provided by Travis behind the scenes. This is what I mean, behind the scenes to Friends of Seville, the downtown mall lobbying group that was then presented to Charlottesville City Council that was then turned into news

on multiple platforms in Central Virginia. This is what I'm talking about behind the scenes. Keep going here. Well, the intent of that is to show that there are some real struggles, and there is a real issue. And in fairness, we have lost roughly about 2,500 people from the corporate world Monday through Friday on the downtown mall, give or take. Now, a lot of these people…

Because of hybrid remote work. Correct. Yeah. And that has drastically also impacted our downtown. So it is a very important to know that there is that factor, but that still means that there are a lot of businesses that are struggling and we need to figure out a way to be able to bring people back. Um, and right now the number one piece of feedback is what happened to the

downtown mall. If you go look, you can go look on TripAdvisor, downtown mall, and you can read the reviews yourself. That has a lasting impact. And it's no different than going to a restaurant and understanding. If you are served a bad plate of food, you tell 10 people. If you are served a great plate of food, historically, you tell one. Right now, our greatest piece of feedback is what happened to downtown. I will not be back there. And that is an issue, not just for our downtown mall, but that's for our wedding community that is also helping support a lot of our local businesses. And so if those

people that are getting married aren't bringing 250 of their closest friends for their big day, we have an impact. And we were able to present that with some other parties as well that own vineyards and show how all of this is actually intermingled. Knowing that our second largest driver

to our economy is tourism spending money appropriately to be able to make sure that we have brand awareness we have some really large issues so i go back and i talk about 2017 because charlottesville you know we a horrible experience, absolutely horrific experience that we all can remember in August of 2017. And that impacted Charlottesville, and that impacted the Charlottesville brand and whatever it is that we are. And here we are. We deal in a lot of different markets across the country as the 100 Collection. We have a lot of great data.

And the data that I look at there and then the data that I look at here, it's two different worlds. What's happening here? And it's specific to certain regions. So when I look at the spending, I realize that we have the least amount of… So page 17 back on screen if you could. So yeah. When I look at our spending, I'm like, wow, it's it's rough. And if you go to I believe it would be page 18. So page 17 is comparing other markets tourism spend for Charlottesville with other markets.

Correct. Kind of just setting the stage here. And then the expert will get it get involved here. Tourism spend for Charlottesville. is that a yearly spend on page 70 versus other markets in the Commonwealth? Shows you where it's at. Right. And then in 2025, we have less than a million dollars, which I don't know if that sounds like a lot or a little, but when you have a billion dollar impact, that's very little.

And we have people shouting from the rooftops that are involved in this. We have businesses in our company here, we're managing the branding and advertising for a number of businesses locally. I have more than 10 clients locally that are spending more than a million dollars a year in advertising. And I'm talking businesses in Charlottesville, and he's saying the advertising budget for Charlottesville in totality is less than a million dollars. That's what you're saying. Correct. And you know, while by no means am

I ever the smartest person in the room or any room um there are a lot of other smart people that are involved in the community here that are tourism leaders and they're also saying the exact same thing hey this is you know huge red flag what can we do how can we do it how can we fix it this is not enough this is not enough to get us through this is not enough to help the sandwich shop on the downtown mall that is struggling who only like right now the only plan i understand is how to get tourists here um and how to have them drive you know drive revenue to help keep some of these local businesses um operating including the people um i don't know that the corporate world is going to come back from the hybrid mode. So what can we do to be able to drive tourism dollars, corporate dollars, to be able to bring it back and have that impact our community in a meaningful way so that we can be a compassionate community and help the people that actually need help, the schools and what have you.

It's all interconnected. And the best way I know how to do it is through economic impact. I don't think anybody wants taxation and we certainly don't want any more inflation. So meaning, you know, the three ways that government makes money. Well said. Comments are coming in here. This one is a really good one. How do we get more tourism dollars? What are the valves that pull those contributions to tourism marketing? Sure. I mean, the city and the county have a joint effort, and they agree how much gets allocated to that. And, you know, part of that would be the board advocating to go get larger dollars,

as well as the council and the supervisors agreeing that this needs to happen and this is a large economic impact they can go look at other communities that do do that like charleston ashville though you know obviously other things have happened there but um who directly understand the economy and the impact and how those dollars are returned adam healy drew attention to this five or six years ago. And it was very much ignored. When it was not just ignored, I think chastised in a lot of ways. Adam Healy was serving as interim director of the CACVB when he brought attention on this show that we should be spending more on tourism and immediately got chastised by

activists in the community and still nearly i mean we're approaching 10 years later this is still an issue well and we have not maybe recovered i think it's very important you know it's like most important for the activists or anybody else to understand is this is how the economy works. This is how we are allowed to be a very compassionate community and do really great things to be able to serve the underserved. We have to have dollars. And the easiest, quickest, best way to have dollars that we can have go into a meeting in Infoblack is when you have a tourist that doesn't live here that we have to go support by building another school that we can't afford right now. I mean, the bottom line is there's a lot that we can't afford. We've got to figure out how to be able to afford this.

And I'll always argue that the best way to do it is by have people come, then go and drop those dollars directly into the economy. And so it's just, you know, I like facts. And that would be just an educational opportunity where showcasing, hey, by the way, like, for this dollar, this is how many hundred dollars come into the economy. He's basically saying for the activists in the community that like to throw shade, if you want to see your efforts realized, we need money to make that happen. And the easiest way to get money is by bringing more people into the community that are spending 4x per head than locals within the community. That's what he's saying. And that's something we've tried to champion over and over again on this program. This is a question from number one in the family, Deep Throat. He says, I'm curious what Travis

thinks of the city's enforcement on Airbnb rules. And he says he knows your spots. He assumes they're all legit. But if he thinks, if you think, that some of the product that is being put out there is below radar, and how local government is enforcing or choosing not to enforce that product? Well, I would say, firstly,

or first, that everything that we have is legal that has a permit, and it is up to the owner to be able to maintain that permit on an annual basis. That being said, we work very closely with the city. I think they've been doing a great job on increasing enforcement, and now they're using third-party technology to be able to go find those illegal properties. And so I think the people that are illegal and illegally operating probably will get, hopefully, a letter in the mail here fairly soon. Gotcha. This is from Ginny Hu on Twitter.

Travis's point is one of the reasons we made a concerted effort last year to try out more local restaurants and tag them on social media with positive experiences. If more people would speak up when they are happy, it would make a huge difference for those businesses. She applauds you with what you're saying on, on the show. A lot of comments coming in here. I'll tell you, I mean, I appreciate that. And that's absolutely huge. By the way, they don't only need those comments, but they need those reviews on Google.

It's a great way to be able to drive, um, awareness to their local restaurants, but that's also the reason why we built Charlottesville Insider, um, as a social media platform mainly is to serve the boutique shops and the restaurants. We do it for free, um, but to drive awareness of who they are. And so, I mean, I do think the cool thing to know as well is, you know, tourists come here and they want to experience these local businesses. Right. And so that's the reason why one of the reasons why we bring awareness via Charlottesville insiders platform,

um, is to help showcase those. Um, they're not coming here for the Apple, Apple, these neighborhood bar and grill. They're coming here for continental divide and continental divide is literally, you know,

got no sign because they're like, right. You want to hide, but, um, they're coming for for Continental Divide, and Continental Divide has literally got no sign because they're like, we want to hide. But they're coming for those local experiences. And so the more you tweet, the more you review, the more you help showcase these local businesses. I mean, it takes a village, but I will tell you, they very much need it. Walk us through the Charlottesville Insider. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I mean, initially when we were going to build Isle of Siebel out and we bought this space, I initially wanted it to be a tourism check-in point. And then the challenge we figured out right away is for this to be a tourism check-in point. We needed to staff it Wednesday, Thursday,

Friday, and Saturday till like 10 o'clock at night. And then finding labor that wanted to sit in here until 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock at night, answering questions from tourists was extremely challenging, and it was an intensive model, and then we pivoted. I thought what you built with Charlottesville Insider on the downtown mall, viewers and listeners, this was on the same side of the mall as Hamilton's, the same side as Old Met, was effing brilliant, dude. I love the sexy nature of the layout with the big screen TVs. I love the function way. I love the branding. I just, I just have tip of the cap to what you built there. What did you find my curiosity, um, as someone that's dabbled in this space,

pros and cons of building that model out? Trials and tribulations. Well, I mean, I think the most important thing to understand is while there are definitely some successes, there's plenty of failures. And I said this at the time, and I don't mind sharing this, that is the dumbest financial thing

I've ever done in the history of operating. But I did it purely due to frustration. Well, you did it for the betterment of the community. Well, it's an online, there's charlottesvilleinsider.com, which has a huge amount of online traffic, is a marketing platform. There are ways to support it. And by all means, that allows us to be able to help support content, to be able to drive it to local businesses.

The bricks and mortar part of it, the Visitor's Bureau had to pull off the downtown wall. I understand why. You literally were going into the Visitor's Center and having to step over somebody to be able to get a brochure for Monticello. This was by the bus station. The Visitor's Bureau, and I'm just very pointed, he chooses his words better than I do here. The Visitor's Bureau was an epicenter for the houseless. It was the antithesis of a Visitor's, the most unwelcoming Visitors Bureau ever. And occasionally you will see the Visitors Bureau in its mobile setup with a van parked on the mall.

And I appreciate the efforts that they're making. But frankly speaking, for a region where the second largest driver of the economy, tourism, the fact that our visitors infrastructure, our bureau infrastructure, all say this. My words, not your words. My words, I don't want him to get me. These are my words here. It's so piss poor. It's disappointing to me.

It is disappointing to me. There is no bureau. So he tried in a lot of ways to become that bureau, a privatized version of that bureau. Well, I wanted to make sure that there was an open lobby to the visitors of downtown. And I don't fault the visitors bureau for pulling off the downtown mall because policy

dictated how they had to operate and that was a bad experience for the guests. I don't know how else they would have gotten around it because we were dealing with something else. I get it. I want to make sure that that's understood on my end. But yes, I mean, we opened up Charlottesville Insider as a bricks and mortar business

to be able to welcome people and showcase. Once again, like just point them literally, hey, that's a great restaurant. That's a great shop. Go try Monticello. Go try this wine. Here's how to go do it. And so we're going to reintroduce a new version of that coming here soon.

What's the 2025 version of that look like? Is it strictly a digital play? Well, we'll keep the bricks and mortar side of Charlottesville Insider by all means. But we will once again open it up as a lobby, if you will, to our visitors. I do believe we are going to have a Made in Charlottesville component to it where local producers, we want to be able to showcase some of the goods that they do

and provide that retail opportunity for them. I've been able to look at other markets where that's been quite successful, but we want to look to help serve the people who are trying to get their products out and see these visitors, you know, on the downtown mall. And so, uh, we want to best showcase Charlottesville. So, um, if we have to pivot, we have to pivot that it happens. Um, there are plenty of failures. Um, and it's, uh, you know, again, it's, we are very passionate about serving the community.

So we keep supporting Charlottesville Insider to be able to serve, um, these businesses that need greater awareness. I respect what you did there. And, and I totally know what you're saying. He throws, he throws stuff on the wall, see if it sticks. If it doesn't, he tries something different. And that's like the definition of, of a successful entrepreneur, uh, an entrepreneur that does not try is just an entrepreneur.

That's going to waste more money because they're just thinking about something. It's the opportunity cost of not thinking. This has come in, and this is a great question. Travis touched on this briefly. Does he think that Charlottesville, the brand, has recovered since A11 and A12? If not, how far does it have to go? You know, I think it's a really great question i think uh one of the things that's probably fairly important to understand is that courtney the director of the visitors bureau when she did have appropriate funding um she was able to go lobby journalist and get us uh the wine enthusiast wine region of the world world it was a world wine region of the world and please like all of the vineyards

everybody had a huge involvement but at the end of the day she had dollars to be able to lobby to get journalists to pay attention that's how we got that and that actually helped drastically improve our brand um however when they some of the research that she's done, no, it's still, it's still people are quite aware. We have not recovered. I mean, the way that I would look at it is quite literally look at the visitation, look at the traffic on the downtown mall. 2017, we had three and a half million people. We're at 2.4 million right now. And we were looking at the average weekend over this past year was down about 10%, 12%. When I go look at the restaurants and I go ask how they're doing, they're about down 10%, 15% of 24 over 23.

So that would tell me that we're heading in the wrong direction. Comments continue to come in. This one's on sports. This is a great question. On what? Sports. UVA football and basketball have struggled of late. Can he put in perspective the impact of the football and basketball team on our community?

Well, I think that any time you have a football stadium that's not very full, that's going to have a direct impact on the economy. And the main thing to know about the football visitors is they tend to stay versus the basketball visitors might stay a night or two maybe but maybe yeah and so i would argue that football has the most direct impact on our local economy by all means and um as a huge football fan um i would love to see nothing more than that return um i always find it kind of amazing that Michigan football can have a crowd of 100,000 people plus, regardless of who they're playing. Sometimes we can't get above 30,000. Often. Yeah.

And so, yes, it's a huge impact. But thankfully, we do have other things to help offset it, like these beautiful vineyards that seem to be driving great revenue to the local economy in September and October. I mean, throughout the year as well, but we also didn't have that 20 years ago, I might add. We were not known as a wine community in 2005 by any means, and now we are. And so hopefully our football, our sports will recover. You're crushing this interview. Comments are continuing to come in here. This one's a very good one on density.

Earlier in the interview, your guest talked about more density in Charlottesville. Where does that density actually get placed, and what are his thoughts on some of the apartment towers that are being talked about on the downtown mall? I would argue that we need more density close to the downtown mall with a walkable distance even even uh jeff levine's plan for violent crown that massive tower you you're pro that tower you know i haven't had a chance to look at the tower okay i just know that i'm taking a wild guess the business model may or may not work that's currently there. I agree with that.

And it's probably going to end up having a change. Yeah. Jeff's a smart guy. He did a project called 600, I think it's called 600 West Main or what have you. Blue Moon Diner by University Tire. As far as I'm aware, that is fully booked, and it's been successful. I know he has been a huge proponent of affordable housing as well as making sure that zoning code works. I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but I know that density is a way to get people back downtown. One of the things I think is really funny in that when people do

complain about the condition of the downtown mall, like when you have a festival like TomTom, I didn't hear a single complaint about people in the downtown mall. And that's because, you know, everybody just blends in. There's a lot of people and other people go away. But when there's nobody downtown, things stand out a little bit differently. And so if we can get more people within this area, I am for it as long as it's the appropriate building of scale. And that's for council to answer for the people to respond to. Johnny Ornelas, Mexicali and Guadalajara, El Mariachi watching the program.

Carrie Rock, we love when you watch the show. Multiple media outlets watching. Travis Wilburn right here on the program. Convention center. I've heard for 25 years the need for midweek traffic, and we have no problem filling up the hotel rooms on the weekend, even at rates that are shockingly Manhattan equivalent, 500, 600 a night, easy peasy, Sunday breezy. However, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, a lot of these rooms are sitting vacant. How do we change Tuesday, Wednesday, a lot of these rooms are sitting vacant. How do we change that? What's the role of convention? What's the role of what

they're doing over there off Ivy Road with the Kipton, the Forum, and everything else that's coming online with driving midweek business? Really great question. I think the most important part to understand is that a convention center also could be directly related to an airport. The airport is not recovered fully from pre-COVID, unlike other airports in other markets. Why do you think that is? I think a lot of reasons. I don't know what I can share, what I can't share, but I think there's a lot of different reasons. I think a lot of airlines haven't been able to reach capacity. However, there's a new director of the airport He's absolutely phenomenal. He started off at the bottom as a security guard and he's at the top The guy is living breathing eating the airport

He is incredible passionate about it and he wants to improve the experience for everyone And that would also mean that we get flights back in and out which is directly related to how we actually solve the Sunday through Thursday issue. Those are related. Convention center, you can't do the convention center unless you solve the airport. You can't do the airport unless you have to figure out where you're going to put these people and where they can go. I think there's a couple proposals out there. I know that there was a tourism improvement district that's been talked about that could be supported by the hotels. A tourism improvement district?

This is different than the business improvement district for downtown Charlottesville? I hadn't heard about this, so this is fresh for me here. Well, maybe I'm not supposed to be saying anything. Tourism improvement district, what is that? That is a tax that the hotels agree to lobby to be able to help support a convention center. But a convention center could be agnostic to any hotel. It could help us get larger events. It could help us get larger groups.

That's a brilliant idea. So basically the hotels would privately fund a convention center, awareness for the convention center, market share for the convention center, realizing a convention center. That's what you're saying? That is. That's a genius idea. It could be incredible. Is that realistic?

It's very realistic. Because that tax gets passed on to tourists. That does not impact locals. Drive Sunday through Thursday foot traffic, which is just incremental revenue, more influx of dollars for our community. That's a great idea. I mean, everything's realistic when you figure out what your due-to-save ratio is. We have a problem here with doing, or excuse me, talking a lot and not ever doing anything. 100%.

There's a lot of research that supports that. There's a lot of people that are, again, way smarter than I. I've been able to look at that. I'm a huge fan of it. There's a couple different areas that it could go in. But by all means, would it benefit the community? Absolutely. And of course the hotels would be in favor of that because that would be passed on to their customer.

Totally. And their customer is a tourist. Correct. That is a genius idea. Well, that tourist is directly related to meals tax, lodging tax, which goes directly back into the coffers, which goes directly back into our community, which helps alleviate real estate taxes on us locals that are already feeling a pinch of taxes on rooftops and personal property. 100%. That is a genius idea. We are 65 minutes in. I

just looked at the clock for the first time. Dude has crushed it. Travis Wilburn, guys, 100%. that officials are listening to you right here? Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing is that we need action. We need it now, and we needed it last year, and we need it now more than ever. As you said from the very get-go of the show, I like to operate behind the scenes. This is by no means in my best interest. I'm not very showy by any means. I don't want to be the face of anything.

However, we need change. We need it now. And we have got to create an action plan, and we need to hold people accountable, and we need to make people deliver those results. And so there are a lot of really great people that are struggling, that have been a part of our community for a long time. And I'd love to, to, to be able to help, um, them, um, get the help that they need. Olivia branch, um, loves the interview. She says, don't forget about the economic impact

of weddings in our area. Huge, huge impact. Um, Elliot Harding, the talented Esquire put a convention center on biscuit run enough land to go around, in my opinion, for a suggestion of where that could go. Elliot Harding, I always love running into you. We do need to get together for that beer at Selvage, my friend. We should do this more. Well, dude, you know, there's a little-known secret that I don't mind dropping. Okay. There was a plan for a fairly decent-sized convention center in West 2nd at that time.

I know there was mixed reviews. West 2nd? West 2nd. That was the parking lot project over there next to South Street and Water Street. The Woodard project. Keith Woodard. Yeah. Where he walked away from a million-two of underground infrastructure because he got frustrated with dealing with City Hall

and the Nakia Walker regime at the time. He said, enough already. I'll just lose a million plus dollars here with this project. I'm not going to do it anymore. And now we have the beloved farmer's market that is hosted on an asphalt black parking lot in the dog days of summer instead of having a fantastic home for it

that Keith was going to build. Well, those are all your words, not mine. But just to be clear, I would argue that there are some really great areas of downtown where if a convention center was very close to the mall, there's a lot of people that would be able to benefit from that. Convention center in that spot would have effing crushed it. Would have crushed it. Just an idea.

Yeah, that is a fantastic spot. Any thoughts on Dewberry? The call for bids, the call for offers was January 9th. Interestingly, that was five days ago, and nothing we have heard on a call for offers for the Dewberry Hotel with the folks marketing and trying to sell the Dewberry, the same team behind the sale of the Quark, the same team behind the sale of the Quark and the same team behind the sale of Keswick Hall.

Anything you want to offer on Dewberry? I hope it gets done. There are some challenges. And so I think one of the facts that people don't understand is to build a hotel, unless you're going to put all the money up front, you are going to finance it. And if you finance it, you have to have parking and you have to showcase that you have parking. That is a fact. That is actually what prohibited this from getting

done. Bottom of my head, Michael Payne kiboshed the deal and his first effort for city council, Payne the activist, pretty much said, we're not going to give real estate breaks and cheap parking to a wealthy white out-of-market developer. Literally in the bottom of the ninth inning, a Mike Signer negotiated deal. Dewberry gets so pissed off, he says, fine, I'm out. I'm going to leave it as a skeleton. I'll give you 60-some thousand dollars a year in real estate taxes, but I'm going to leave it here as a skeleton, um, as it is right now. That's what happened. Yeah.

And so what people also don't realize, everybody has a different idea of what it can be. But at the end of the day, the ceilings are so low that the only utility for it right now is hotel. Arguably, whether that will be successful or not, TBD really hard to have a high end hotel or any hotel with eight foot ceilings as of now that would get a

drop ceiling so it's even lower um but i hope the project gets done i hope that we can work as a city to be able to figure out how to navigate it um it's been uh what since 2008 um so i sure do hope that we'll be able to close it up and see something happen there. But it's going to take action from our local government and some help with parking if it's going to go down that route. Dude, I knew this interview was going to be good. I didn't know it was going to be this great. I mean, you effing crushed this. Travis Wilburn, guys, just hit a grand slam on this interview.

I sincerely mean this. I will try to pester you and reach out to you again about coming on the program. This was a plus, plus, plus, Travis Wilburn. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I sincerely mean this. Thank you for coming on the program. Judah, thank you for scrambling at the last minute with the

renderings on screen and the data's on screen. I appreciate you. Nate Kibler's show is up at 2 30 we actually ran 70 minutes here so this guy's kind of slightly giving me the evil eye here over here as he gets ready for a third show today um this is what it's all about we just want to be the water cooler of conversation for charlottesville and have real conversations about real stuff in our community and i think travis brought it today um we're back in the saddle tomorrow at 12 30 with the i love seville show so long everybody you killed it he's gonna tell us when the mics and cameras are off they will be up here shortly