Explore St. Louis, the agency tasked with promoting St. Louis as a tourism destination, can point to some recent big numbers. For the past fiscal year, total room nights booked for hotels in St. Louis city and county were up 46 percent from prior year. For May to July 2025, revenue per room was up too, bucking national trends. And in that same period, more hotel rooms were sold in the metro area than in any previous year during that period.
Explore St. Louis’ new CEO, Brad Dean, says he wishes the agency could take sole credit for all that good news. But, as he explained yesterday on stage at America’s Center for the agency’s Annual Meeting & Awards Ceremony, the recent wins are a product of a whole lot of things, like large conventions and meetings (including, Dean joked, the Seventh Day Adventist gathering that “nearly broke our airport”), big concerts at The Dome and great festivals. “We also had a lot of small and medium-sized meetings, and then we got some lift from visitors as we started to promote in some new markets where we haven’t advertised before,” he said.
Keep up with local business news and trends
Subscribe to the St. Louis Business newsletter to get the latest insights sent to your inbox every morning.
What really happened, he concluded: “We let St. Louis be St. Louis.” And those natural strengths are why Dean is confident in the overall direction of his agency and tourism to St. Louis.
Dean explained that he chose St. Louis over job offers from New York, San Francisco, and Chicago not just because his first visit to the Gateway City as a seven-year-old made a profound impression (although there is also that, as he movingly discussed earlier this year on The 314 Podcast). He said he saw real opportunity that just wasn’t present in the bigger markets wooing him. “Every one of those cities have great brands, a great product, a legacy of accomplishment, but it just felt like their story had already been written,” he said. After visiting St. Louis, he had a clear sense of a place on the upswing. “The sense of progress in momentum was palpable, and it said, ‘This is a place where the story is being rewritten, and everybody’s a part of it.’”
Go Deeper: Hotels were full this summer in part because Explore St. Louis consciously set out to target six markets that were a little further away from where they’d previously advertised, but had affordable, direct flights: Denver, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C. (They continued to seek visitors from what they consider the region’s core markets of Chicago, Memphis, Kansas City, and Indianapolis.)
For these cities, Dean said, “It’s a bit of a blank canvas. And a blank canvas for a promoter is a dream, because we can start to shape the narrative about a St. Louis they’ve never even thought of. It’s not like going to Kansas City, where we’ve got to convince them that we’ve solved all the problems that they think we’ve had over the last 10 years.”
Data suggests, he added, that travelers who are 35 and younger are considerably more “enamored” with St. Louis’ art history, culture, and music than their parents’ generation. By bringing them here, and showcasing St. Louis’ neighborhoods and art scene, they can change perceptions for generations to come. “Some of those travelers will eventually become residents, or they’ll decide it’s a great place to start a business or go to college,” Dean said. “That’s the incremental lift that we’re looking for.”
What’s Next: Major conventions book out years ahead, and while St. Louis recently inked some big commitments for 2027 and beyond, Dean warned that the interim could be tough. “2026 is not going to be a great year of meetings and conventions,” he said. But, he added, “The old saying goes, you can’t determine the direction of the wind, but you can adjust your sails.” He said the metro area hopes to continue to bring in more curious-minded individual travelers and market St. Louis as a great place to begin a Route 66 journey in its centennial. He argued digital marketing that emphasizes real people, not celebrities, will also work to bring in more visitors.
Despite the bleak 2026 convention schedule, Dean is bullish on the future.
“I’m not interested in just comparing ourselves to Nashville and Indianapolis, and if I hear another story about Columbus or Kansas City, I’m just going to implode,” he told the audience. “If you want to be the best, you got to beat the best, and that’s what we’re going to target in 2026.”
Hear more from Brad Dean on The 314 Podcast.
