Travel Trends: Looking back on an incredible 2025
Each May, National Travel and Tourism Week gives us an opportunity to recognize the essential role of travel in powering the economy and strengthening communities.
This year, it’s pretty easy to look back with pride. As you can see from these stats below, 2025 was a banner year for Baton Rouge!
One of the biggest wins of 2025 was welcoming the United States Bowling Congress Open Championships for the third time! With a record number of registered teams, the USBC set up shop in the Raising Canes River Center for 150 days, with competition running for 21 hours per day on 54 custom-built lanes.
USBC was an incredibly impressive event – but was only one of the many successes last year. Meeting, convention, and sporting events highlights included the 2025 Firefighter Challenge Southwest Region Classic, Louisiana Clean Fuels Summit, Society for Industrial Applied Mathematics, and the Louisiana Dyslexia & Reading Association School Assistance.
All together, our meetings, conventions, and sporting events in 2025 delivered:
The dollars our business and leisure visitors spend at retail stores and restaurants help to keep small businesses open. The tax dollars impact local schools, roads, emergency services and more. Every corner of our parish benefits from these dollars poured into our community!
In 2025, we also launched a new brand, inviting visitors to discover Baton Rouge’s everyday richness at their own pace. We highlighted this new brand with an ad campaign targeting key drive and fly markets and tracked its success with new tools. The Tourism Economics media attribution tool is making us smarter marketers and helping us understand the visitor journey. We can directly link our digital advertising to real-world results:
We saw visitation from all 50 states with the highest visitation coming from these states and locations:
With our top origin markets being:
- New Orleans, LA
- Houston, TX
- Lafayette, LA
- Slidell/Mandeville, LA
- Dallas, TX
- Pensacola, FL
- Houma, LA
- Gulfport/Biloxi, MS
- Atlanta, GA
- Mobile, AL
In the Gulf Coast alone, we saw a 29.2% increase in visitation YOY!
Our lodging sector reflected the demand we saw across all market segments.
As you can see, 2025 was a tremendous year for Visit Baton Rouge and the Capital City’s tourism industry continues to be an essential part of economic development that is improving the quality of life for our entire parish.
To read more about our 2025, check out our impact report!
