By Jennifer Reynolds, contributing editor and writer with a passion for Georgia’s creative industries
If you have ever traveled out of town to attend a music festival, watched your favorite collegiate team participate in an esports tournament or visited the real world locations where your favorite movies were filmed, you have participated in entertainment tourism.
An emerging type of concept, it already is making a significant impact in Georgia. Events such as “Music Midtown,” the “Atlanta Film Festival,” “DreamHack,” Macon’s “Bragg Jam,” the “Georgia Esports League” are just a few examples of the ways entertainment brings tourists to the state every year.
There are many examples of how Georgia’s Creative Economy is driving tourism dollars into the state each year. One that stands out started with a single television show in a small town on the outskirts of Atlanta. A native of Senoia and a former member of the local downtown development authority, Tray Baggarly, has witnessed the evolution of his hometown as film and TV have reshaped it.
Perhaps no production has made a bigger impact than “The Walking Dead,” filmed in the little town that once housed only a handful of businesses such as a grocery and a hardware store. Today, Senoia has blossomed into one of Georgia’s most desirable tourist stops. The show, which ran for 11 seasons, calls Senoia “Ground Zero” for its cast of survivors of a zombie apocalypse—with its impact on the city still burgeoning to this day. While the show aired its final season in 2022, fans still flock to the location.
When he was Executive Director of the Coweta County Convention and Visitors Bureau, Baggarly and his team would poll visitors and ask what brought them to the community. By his estimate, 80% of the 20,000 tourists who visited annually came because of “The Walking Dead.”
What’s more, many of the visitors were international, some spending an entire week in the town visiting their favorite filming locations and hoping to catch a glimpse of actors like Norman Reedus, who was frequently seen at local spots downtown. Baggarly was even interviewed by a newspaper from Germany, helping to demonstrate the show’s far-flung appeal.
Today, Baggarly is Coweta County’s liaison for Georgia’s Camera Ready Communities, a program that connects filmmakers with locals who can help them secure filming locations, obtain necessary permits, and more. In his 12 years on the job, Baggarly estimates he has helped more than 100 productions make local connections to film in Coweta County.
When he is not showing scouts potential filming locations, Baggarly enjoys visiting downtown and taking an informal inventory of the license plates he spies on the cars parked along Main Street. “They come from all over the country.”
Senoia is not the only example of what the entertainment industry offers Georgians. Overall, tourism makes a significant impact on Georgia’s economy. Gov. Brian Kemp recently announced that 2022 was the best year on record for tourism in Georgia, delivering a whopping $73 billion dollars of economic impact to the state, up 13% from the previous year.
Georgia’s third-party researcher, Longwoods International, began gathering information on film tourism in 2020. Explore Georgia reports that between 11%-13% of domestic overnight travelers to Georgia, and between 6%-9% of day trippers say film tourism is one of the factors bringing them to the state. These numbers do not even include the impact music, arts and esports have on tourism.
There have been calls for more formal data on Georgia’s entertainment tourism. Baggarly envisions using it on his quest to educate Georgians about the importance of the industry and to show local government officials they are getting far more for their money than they might realize when they green light a production in the county.
With Georgia playing host to a record number of 412 productions in 2022, the post-pandemic return of popular music festivals and holding massive esports events, the future is ripe for an ever-growing number of tourists to visit the Peach State.
Where Creativity Meets Hospitality
A new organization is advocating and attempting to grasp how Georgia’s Creative Economy intersects with the state’s hospitality industry. Launched in 2023, Entertainment Tourism Alliance of Georgia (ETAG), led by Chairman and CEO Lynda Smith, aims to fill a gap in Georgia’s entertainment industry by focusing on three core areas:
1. Collecting the impact data of all entertainment, music, gaming, esports, and TV and film
2. Supporting workforce development with a specific emphasis on hospitality
3. Optimizing support for future economic impact for the state
Currently, ETAG is gathering data from across the entire industry to determine what multipliers are used. To achieve this, Smith has drawn on experts from across the industry with a goal of having the various disciplines work proactively together. “ETAG works collaboratively with other advocacy groups, universities, event planners, production coordinators and the government officials to identify ways to document and highlight this booming area of growth in Georgia.”
Her vision for unification is not limited to the industry. Smith says it is important that communities across the state are represented. She envisions educating communities, especially rural regions, on how they can capitalize on events that have already happened, including filming locations for major movies and TV shows like The Whistle Stop Cafe in Juliette, which was the iconic backdrop from “Fried Green Tomatoes.”
“A community can live off of one show for years to come,” Smith says.
While it is an ambitious project, it is a necessary one if Georgia is going to get the maximum benefits from entertainment tourism. Identifying and adjoining tourism numbers from entertainment will help policymakers better understand the true impact of film and other incentives on Georgia. “It’s a big undertaking, but so many people are passionate about it. I believe we can bring together a brain trust and build a unified resource.”
To read more features, visit the Creative Economy Journal.
