Spotlight On: Brian Luallen, CEO, Fair Park

Spotlight On: Brian Luallen, CEO, Fair Park

2022-10-10T12:41:08-04:00October 10th, 2022|Dallas-Fort Worth, Spotlight On, Tourism|

2 min read October 2022 — The future of Fair Park in Dallas is looking better than ever. Brian Luallen, the Park’s CEO, told Invest: he is looking forward to having more than 8 million visitors a year in the next five years with all the improvements and projects that are expected to make Fair Park a major global attraction.

What are the most important priorities for Fair Park moving forward?

The most important project that we’re working on is the delivery of a community park that’s been promised to the surrounding neighborhoods for 40 years. It’s a very large piece of land that was taken from the surrounding community and so fulfilling that promise has always been the first and most important project. We’re very deep into the design development of that. The concept is very well developed, very well informed and we will continue to engage in public education. We anticipate the first new major construction out of the master plan will start in the first or second week of January 2023. 

We are very close, less than a year away from breaking ground, but we’ve also accelerated a variety of other projects. We have partnered with the Convention Center expansion. There is a funding opportunity from the city that will result in Fair Park receiving roughly $300 million from hotel occupancy tax so that it does not become a burden for a local taxpayer. That capital infusion will be the highest economic stimulus we’ve ever gotten and it will allow us to accelerate several projects in the first five years, such as massive improvements to the Music Hall, the Cotton Bowl stadium, the automobile and centennial buildings, as well as the Fair Park Coliseum. All of these are critical for driving local tourism. 

We’ve also been working on a loop trail that will entirely circle Fair Park. It will connect to the Santa Fe Trail and ultimately the Loop Trail expansion in a way that gives us better mobility and safer options for people to navigate our campus. That’s another project that we simply didn’t believe we’d be able to achieve in the first five years and it’s exciting to be able to accelerate that and to know that we’re on track. Fair Park just has an incredibly bright future.

What is your vision to make Fair Park a year-round destination?

All our master plan improvements are designed to create a critical mass that sustains this property on a year-round basis. It’s based on work that you’d see at comparable sites around the country, such as Balboa Park in San Diego and Forest Park in St. Louis, all having been World Fair sites. 

We have very large national and international events, such as The Rolling Stones playing in November or Coldplay playing the second concert in 20 years at the Cotton Bowl. Those large events are very powerful marketing vehicles to help enhance the park’s exposure and remind everyone that we’re here to attract a lot of people and a lot of excitement. We balance that by also providing year-round attractions. We have a new operator at the Dallas Children’s Aquarium that is doing a phenomenal job. We are seeing the very best numbers out of that facility that have ever been reported, not only from an attendance standpoint but also from a revenue standpoint. It shows that the strategy is working. 

After two years of the pandemic, we see the light at the end of the tunnel. People want to be together and Fair Park is uniquely positioned to welcome people not only from the region but from around the world for one-of-a-kind experiences.

What separates Dallas from other tourism markets?

We get visitors from around the world right now. At Fair Park we get between 5.5 and 6 million people a year. Roughly half of that is confined to the State Fair of Texas, the largest fair in the entire nation from an attendance standpoint, and we’re very excited to see some of those additional numbers grow because Dallas is right in the middle of the country.

We also have incredible transportation infrastructure that is only getting better. DART, which is our light transit and mass transit system, is efficient and easy to use. We have two incredible international airports. And Dallas is well known for being this infrastructure transportation hub that constantly brings in new people. There is a reason that we as a city are looking to make major public investments using hotel occupancy tax at both the Convention Center, which is being massively expanded in the next few years, and at Fair Park. We serve as anchors for a whole tourism economy because so many people are coming to Dallas and they need the experience side. We’re known for business. So, the conventions make sense, but what do you do when you’re here? We are serving the Fair Park Cultural District to act as an amplifier along with the city’s other two major cultural districts to create connectivity and round out that space. There’s always a great and unique experience for anyone who comes to Dallas.

What is your outlook for the next three to five years when it comes to tourism and hospitality in Dallas?

All signs are that the pandemic is behind us at this point, and we are seeing great rates at our hotels. We see a trend that suggests that by August, we will be back at pre-pandemic numbers in all our hotels, not only from a revenue standpoint but also in terms of occupancy. The two airports are also doing exceptionally well. 

As we look forward to the next five years, there’s a series of improvements that will happen across this campus that will grow our annual attendance somewhere north of 8 million people a year and we couldn’t be more excited to make that happen.

For more information, visit: 

https://fairparkfirst.org/ 

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