By Shelia Watson

When it comes to tourism in South Carolina, there is much to celebrate but, equally, much work to do, said Chad Prosser, head of S.C. Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism.

“We’re a protected industry based on the fact that our product is a place, so we’re not worried about off-shoring tourism,” he said. “You can’t pick up downtown Charleston and move it to Shanghai.”

Speaking at the 42nd annual conference of the South Carolina Economic Developers’ Association earlier this month, Prosser pointed to the influence of the state’s No. 1 industry: an overall economic impact of $14.6 billion providing 11% of the state’s employment and $1.1 billion in tax revenue.

“We’ve only scraped the surface of the potential we have here,” he said. “The money comes in incrementally in diverse places like food and beverage, hotels, carriage rides, so you don’t tend to notice the aggregate impact, but it’s quite a bit.

“When you think about economic development, you think about ribbon cuttings on big buildings, but tourism is just as important. It’s just harder to quantify.”

Working with the Tourism Cluster Committee for the New Carolina, South Carolina Council on Competitiveness, Prosser, along with international consultant Michael MacNulty and his team from Ireland’s Tourism Development International, produced a report on South Carolina’s tourism industry that quantified some of that potential.

The report, which called tourism in South Carolina “a flower waiting to bloom,” noted that the state could grow its tourism revenues to $40 billion by the year 2020.

“South Carolina has the people, the product and the potential for so much more,” MacNulty said in the executive summary. “The world just keeps getting flatter, and given the competition from other states and other countries, now is the time to move toward making South Carolina a truly competitive player in that most sustainable of economic arenas: tourism and hospitality.”

The Tourism Action Plan, presented in more than 600 pages in three volumes by Tourism Development International, is the result of seven months of research by international experts who conducted more than 400 interviews and traveled across the state to evaluate the state’s overall approach to tourism development.

TDI, whose client list includes the national tourism agencies of China, India, the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands, as well as corporations such as Delta Air Lines and Holiday Inn, began working in South Carolina in November 2005.