View From Afar S2, E14: IPW 2026 | Tom Noonan on Austin’s Next Era

Welcome to a special IPW 2026 series of View From Afar. In this episode, recorded live from the conference floor, Visit Austin president and CEO Tom Noonan sits down with Afar editorial director Billie Cohen to talk about a city that’s in the middle of one of the most ambitious reinventions of any major American destination—and how it’s keeping momentum without its biggest meeting venue.

Tom has led Visit Austin since 2016, though his career in destination marketing spans nearly four decades. Under his leadership, Austin has more than doubled its downtown hotel inventory, hit record convention bookings, and launched the Visit Austin Foundation.

But he’s also navigating the $1.6 billion Unconventional ATX project—a complete tear-down and rebuild of the Austin Convention Center. The old building came down in April 2025; the new one opens in 2029. In the meantime, Austin is competing for major events without its largest meeting venue, even as it adds 36 airport gates, three new arenas, a stadium expansion, light rail to the airport, and a redesigned downtown.

Transcript

Billie: I’m Billie Cohen, an Afar editorial director. Welcome to View From Afar, a podcast that spotlights the people and ideas shaping the future of travel. And in this special series, I’m coming to you live from the floor of IPW, the annual travel conference organized by the U.S. Travel Association, to share the best of America with the rest of the world. It’s a big moment in US travel. Our country is preparing to cohost the FIFA World Cup and celebrate its 250th anniversary. All this is happening even as international arrivals are down and global events are affecting travel across the world. But the reasons we all travel haven’t changed. In fact, they’ve become more important. Joy and connection. So we’re talking to industry leaders about how their destinations are adapting in a tough world, and how they’re finding ways to give visitors experiences that make them smile and make them feel welcome.

My guest today is Tom Noonan, president and CEO of Visit Austin. Tom has been in the role since 2016, though his career in destination marketing goes back nearly 4 decades. And under Tom’s leadership, Austin has been on a roll. The city has seen year over year increases in visitors, record convention bookings, the launch of the Visit Austin Foundation, and so much more. But Tom is also navigating one of the most ambitious and disruptive projects of any major U.S. destination right now. The $1.6 billion It’s a tear down and rebuild of the Austin Convention Center. The old building came down in April 2025, but the new one doesn’t open until 2029. And in the meantime, Austin is essentially competing for major events without its biggest meeting venue. So we’ll talk about how a destination keeps momentum without its convention center, what the new Austin Tourism Public Improvement District is doing, and how the live music capital of the world is evolving and expanding its identity.

Welcome to the show.

Tom: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Billie: So I start with a hard hitting question. Brisket or breakfast tacos, which is the truer Austin food and where should I go for the best version?

Tom: I look at this as your trick question, and I’ll tell you why I think it’s your trick question, because you can have brisket breakfast tacos. Okay. You don’t have to choose brisket and or breakfast. You can get all in one taco. Okay, so there’s that. But I mean, we are known for our tacos, not only for breakfast, but for lunch and for dinner. My current favorite new taco, there’s a restaurant called Verdad, and it’s kind of up in near the Tarrytown part of town, and it’s a high end Mexican restaurant and they have filet mignon tacos.

Billie: Wow. That’s like an upscale taco.

Tom: Killer, right? But there are so many Michelin restaurants that are, you know, Mexican that have great tacos. They almost don’t want to say which one’s your favorite, because you’re gonna get in trouble with 19 other people.

Billie: I also like that you don’t have to choose. You can have it all.

Tom: You can have it all. Yeah.

Billie: So you’ve been leading Visit Austin since 2016. And during that time, the city has become one of the fastest growing major destinations in the country. So what feels meaningfully different to you about Austin’s tourism profile now compared to when you started ten years ago?

Tom: Well, there was a story like in 2014, we had 6,500 rooms downtown. A decade later, we’re 16,000 rooms downtown. Wow. So room counts changed a lot. Culinary enrichment as well. You know, the whole Michelin Guide and other things in terms of restaurants. But when I think about Austin, we’re really good in all the different tourism platforms. We’re a great media destination. We’re a great family destination, we’re a great tech and corporate and all those kind of things. Business, travel, we hit all those platforms and do them pretty well. What I’m really excited about is, yes, we’ve done great things over the last ten years, but literally we’re redoing everything in the city by 2031. So we’re adding 36 gates to the airport right now. So we’re going to go from 32 to almost 70 gates at the airport. We’re building a brand new convention center, as you know. We’re adding more hotels. We’re adding two new arenas, a 4,000-seat AEG arena. That’s a concert venue. UT is building a second 6,500-seat arena for volleyball. That’s also going to be able to do concerts as well. So we’re adding some new concert venues. We expanded the UT football stadium. We built the Moody Arena. That’s where they play basketball and as a concert venue. Two of the last three years, the top arena of its size in the world, a new Q2 stadium for soccer. Light rail from the airport to the hotels. We are redoing everything. So I always tell people, yeah, we’ve been a hot destination, but we’re the next hot destination again in 2031 because it’s the same city, but we’ve just improved every public facility that you need transportation as well. We have this, you know, hill country and we have the lakes downtown. So a really pretty downtown where people are living. It’s exciting. Our mayor says we’re redoing the entire downtown living room right now.

Billie: Why 2031? Why is that the deadline?

Tom: The center is going to be done in December 2028, early 2029. The airport’s probably more like twenty thirty one. There’ll be different parts of the airport expansion coming on before then.

Billie: Oh, that’s just how long things are going to take. It’s not like that was a deadline that you set.

Tom: When you walk into Austin in 2031. All of this stuff will be done.

Billie: And you heard it here, folks. First, where to go in 2031? We’re starting our list now.

Tom: You could go before then. By the way, you don’t have to wait till 2031 .

Billie: Well, you brought up something I wanted to ask about, which is the convention center. So it came down in April of 2025. And as you said, it won’t reopen probably until 2029.

Tom: We have 40 months without a convention.

Billie: So and when it opens, it’s going to be a $1.6 billion, zero carbon civic space. It doubles its original footprint and it’s integrating into the surrounding communities. That is a lot to ask of a convention center, right? Why gamble so big on a project?

Tom: Well, first of all, I would describe it as Austin’s convention center. So we decided we were going to build a building that was reflective of Austin and its culture. So there’s going to be, you know, $18 million worth of art in this building. You’re going to see it from the streets. They already hired the artists, and they’re already working on their designs, and that’s great. So you’re taking this convention center brand new one, dropping it in a park setting.

So there’s a new Waterloo Greenway that goes from Rainey Street, which is also being redone. This trail goes right past the convention center and goes all the way up to UT campus. And you never have to cross the street. And then they’re building a park next to the trail. So you’re literally taking this convention center, dropping it in a park setting that’s, you know, a few blocks off the water next to the Rainey district, which is one of our hot entertainment districts. And then we’re redoing 6th Street north of the commissioner by block, and that’s getting redone as well. So we’re redoing all of downtown, but it’s this building.

We were the 65th largest convention center for the 11th largest city or 12th largest city in the country. And the building just was one of the old style convention centers that didn’t have adequate meeting space or ballroom space. And now we’re going to have a building that’s twice the size and still has the ability to expand on the footprint. We’re building on two or three of the areas above the convention. There’s still a third tower we could build at some point if we need to. Down the road. So we’ve taken kind of control of our domain that we can have this bigger convention center. And if we need to expand it, we have the property to do it on.

Billie: And it sounds like you’re all taking pains to make it feel connected to the city. So often a convention center is kind of in its own space, and it’s not really doesn’t feel like it’s part of.

Tom: Reopening Third Street, which was closed with the old building and the center has control of that. We have about 70,000 sq. ft. of outdoor space with the new convention center as well. So it’s not just what’s in the building. There’s some park settings, and there’s an area where we can put a tent down and you can use that for overflow meeting space as well. And then we’ve got this really cool story. There’s this old historic home, and as I understand it, the woman that owned it was the first female teacher in Austin. And that house is going to be put on the plaza at the convention center, and that’s going to become part of the convention center space. So it tells this great story about because, you know, the meetings industry is the largest adult classroom in the world, right? Yeah. So it’s great that we have this former teachers home as part of the facility so that people will be able to use for board receptions or whatever that feels like, right?

Billie: That’s so creative.

Tom: Yeah, it’s gonna be really cool.

Billie: I haven’t heard of anything like that. That’s cool. So how are you keeping all that convention and event business alive in the meantime, especially when event travel is so big.

Tom: So last year when the building closed, we started collecting Airbnb taxes for the first time. So that’s helping pay for the convention center. In Texas, you can give 15 percents of your hotel tax to arts projects and 15 percent to heritage projects, max. But we’re seeing a larger budget because of this collection of Airbnb. And then we also created our Tourism Public Improvement District at the same time. And that gives Visit Austin about $20 million more a year for sales and marketing budget we didn’t have before. 20 percent is to help incentivize business. That’s going to be in the new convention center. So it’s helping us book business for long term for the convention center, which is great. And then after that meeting takes place, that rental fee that we paid for with the TPID, it then becomes general fund revenue. And we think it’s about $5 million a year. And we’ve pledged that to help in the homeless cause.

So it’s like you bring your convention to Austin, you’re actually helping us with the homeless situation in our city, which is a great story. By state law, you have to have a sales use. Well, the sales use for us is hosting this convention. Once you’ve had that and the rent checks been written, that now becomes general fund revenue, and the City Council and the mayor, everybody pledge those dollars to help the homeless cause. It’s an awesome thing, right? It’s just like we take care of our people. And there’s a guy down there that does a thing called mobile loaves and fishes, and he’s got about 2,200 small homes for the homeless community. It’s its own community, like 11 miles from downtown. There’s dog parks and it’s amazing, but there’s an incentive fund for the hotels to buy business for themselves. So we’re driving in-house hotel business instead of doing city wides, we’re doing what we’re calling mini-wides. So we’re encouraging customers saying, tell you what, why don’t you bring that 2,000-room piece of business and split it up among two or three of our hotels. And we’ll incentivize you to do your meeting differently for that year. And it works great for our brand because it’s, you know, you think about SXSW (South by Southwest), it’s a campus style event. So we’re saying, you know, if South By can do this and do it really well, which we just did a few months ago.

Billie: Oh, there’s.

Tom: You can do this with two or three hotels and you can get a nice incentive to do it. You get more of Austin, you can use more of Austin to have your meeting than just besides the convention center. And we’re having lots of success with the mini wide conversation. We thought we were losing about 400,000 room nights a year without having the center downtown ends up probably being more like 600–650. It’s not lost on us. This is we knew this was going to be a struggling time a little bit. National economy probably hasn’t helped much either. But we realized that everybody thought they had that much business. The other hotel that had room nights that they thought that was travel tourism was probably somebody overflow from the convention center, is what we’re figuring out, that it was probably a bigger number than we thought.

Billie: So even though there’s some challenges associated with it, it sounds like this allowed you to kind of do a deep dive and a reset and really understand how.

Tom: That all happened last April. Airbnb collection TPID collection, convention center going down. Yeah, we’re already 12 months into it.

Billie: So so it’s going, it’s going. Yeah, you’ll get there. 2029. On the international side, like you were mentioning, SXSW, Austin has historically been really successful with that. It draws global attention every year, but international travel to the US is down. So are you seeing any softness in Austin’s international numbers, or is that sort of halo of SXSW and tech and music still working to your advantage?

Tom: Well, South By definitely helps us, right? Having Formula one helps us as well. We also partnered with a firm PTG. There are new rep firm out of Mexico, and they’re working with about eight different travel organizations down there that are booking packages for Austin. We’ve never been in that market before. So when you look at what’s happening with travel around the country, you know, the Mexican market is up and we’re a big part of that. We’re seeing a lot of that that’s helpful. We’re getting a new Porter flight on Thursday from Toronto, so we still have all of our Canadian flights and they’re doing well. And now we’ve added another one. So we’re probably one of the few that maybe our Canadian market is not as low as somebody else’s because we’re getting this new flight.

Billie: How did you swing that with so much?

Tom: They wanted a second carrier out of Toronto. We get a lot of folks coming from Toronto down to Austin, probably for the tech industry and some other things.

Billie: That was my next question. What do you think is drawing them?

Tom: It’s definitely tech. It’s definitely, um, medical as well because the new, uh, Dell Medical, you know, everybody’s hurting a little bit, but having this partnership with BTG and then we have a firm, obviously that helps us out of London and we just started a second daily BA flight. So we used to have one. Now we have two. And they’re doing both really well. So I think it has a lot to do with just Austin as a destination.

Billie: It sounds like it’s bringing in a different kind of visitors as well.

Tom: Yeah. One of the great stories for us was two years ago, we launched the Michelin Guide for Texas. I remember we went to the first night when they were revealing all of it, and they would do a slide and before restaurants on it. And there was always one that was Austin. And we were sitting there and they started with the recommended, and they did Bib Gourmand and the stars, and they started doing this and we had all these recommended. So we’re like, man, we used up all of our restaurants on recommended. Oh, you know, then they started doing Bib Gourmand. It was the same kind of thing. Like 17 out of the 41 were also like, oh my gosh, are you kidding me? And then we got to the one stars and there were 15 in the state and we had 7 of them. And there were 2 green stars, you know, and we had both of those, my friends that were in the room from other cities. Like we had no idea like, no, we are big culinary city. And they were just surprised by that. And we had almost 50 restaurants that were on that list. And I was so excited about it. I called the mayor of that, and I said, tomorrow, the story in Austin is going to be that we’re the culinary destination in the state of Texas because we we have more Michelin ranked restaurants than anybody else. And I will tell you what’s happened in 2024, 35 percent of restaurant revenue came from visitors. That’s now 50 percent. Wow. From visitors in just those two short years. So we’re seeing a big spend in culinary people recognizing. And we’ve got James Beard and we’ve had these great legacy restaurants been around for 50 and 60 years. So we have 3 one-star barbecue restaurants. They’re the first barbecue restaurants in Michelin Guide, and they have three of them.

Billie: And of course, it’s in Texas. Of course it’s in Austin. Yeah. So all of that and it’s pretty recent. It’s only the past couple of years. It must be changing the demographic of who your traveler is.

Tom: Yeah. We’re the hill country and we have lakes. We have people that want to come to downtown Austin for its nature. Right. And those opportunities where the live music capital obviously. Right?

Billie: Yeah. How are you balancing that with culinary?

Tom: Oh, it’s they go hand in hand. It’s, you know, one plus one equals three. No, no, it’s, you know, you go have a great meal and then go watch the concert at night, you know, and as an organization, we hire a lot of musicians as well to play gigs for groups that are in town. So sometimes we’ll say, listen, if you’re going to bring a convention in town, we’re going to hire a couple musicians to play during the day at your event. So these musicians get a gig during the day, and then they have a gig at night so they can double dip. And we’re trying to help musicians, you know, be able to live in Austin and afford to live in Austin and make a good living as musicians and.

Billie: But also market one of your best assets.

Tom: Oh, yeah. We know the culinary and music really sells our weekends, right? That that drives that tourism side of it. But the business travel and the meetings part of it drives that Sunday through Thursday for our community. And if you’re living Austin, you love that restaurant. It’s probably still open because what’s happening Sunday through Thursday, not just what’s happening on the weekends.

Billie: You got a very smart system set up.

Tom: I wish I could take credit for it, but I can’t.

Billie: Take some credit for it. We’re talking about visitors, and domestic travel is projected to be really strong this year, especially with the World Cup happening in Texas, Houston and Dallas, our World Cup host cities. Austin is not.

Tom: We’re hosting Saudi Arabia as a training.

Billie: As a team, but no matches.

Tom: There’s conversations about maybe some friendlies that’ll take place. Oh, so they haven’t been announced and finalized. But there’s at least conversations that’ll happen. The great thing for us is this is the first time Saudi Arabia has ever qualified for a World Cup. So we think they’re going to have a pretty good sized delegation. And then we think a lot of people will come in for Houston and Dallas and go like, you know, we’ve got six days ‘til the next match. Let’s go see Austin. Probably. Let’s go see San Antonio while we’re at it. Right. We’re anticipating a lift in our summer travel because of that.

Billie: And what about for America 250. What do you have planned for that?

Tom: So we’re going to have a much bigger celebration for Fourth of July. They’re going to do a separate concert on Friday night. We always have fireworks and the symphony on Saturday. We’re going to drive some more tourism over that weekend as well. Yeah.

Billie: Nice. Let’s switch gears for a minute. Nowadays, so much travel content is automated. AI is everywhere. How is Visit Austin thinking about AI?

Tom: We’ve fully embraced it. We have an AI committee on staff. You know, we’re like, please be using these tools, right? It’ll make you more effective. We use it for, for marketing. Obviously, we use it for creating sales content, graphically showing what our city is going to look like in the future because of all this stuff. So AI has been a great tool for us, and we’re going to continue using it. And it just makes our team a lot more effective. It is here and it’s not going anywhere, and it’s just a tool that we’re all trying to get up to speed on as quickly as we can use it, but our marketing team is using it probably every day.

Billie: Wow. That’s great. Yeah. Speaking of keeping things human and keeping Austin weird. So that motto is over 25 years old, right? So how do you balance promoting more tourism? And the city is growing, you’re building all this construction, you’re expecting a lot more people. How do you balance promoting all of that while still staying credible to the community that makes Austin Austin?

Tom: The most important thing is when you think about a city’s brand, you want it to be authentic, right? Yeah, there is some weirdness in Austin, but we celebrate that and it’s like, it’s not so much awareness as its uniqueness. You be there and you just be you. Don’t be anybody else. You be you and you’re going to be accepted there. There’s the Museum of the Weird. There’s things that are uniquely Austin. We had Matthew McConaughey speak in a convention and he he got up there and he said, uh, you know, you’re going to walk into a bar and you’re going to see a cowboy sitting there next to a lesbian couple sitting next to a guy who’s got his construction uniform on. It sounds like in a YMCA, but really it’s and he’s like, and those guys are all best friends from high school and they still are. And that’s just like, it’s cool. Don’t honk your horn. We don’t like a big ego in Austin. That doesn’t play well. So and he’s right. He really described what your experience is going to be like when you’re in Austin. Everybody Just like, if that’s who you are. Cool. Awesome.

Billie: What are some of your favorite weird things in Austin?

Tom: Oh, what am I saying? My favorite weird things. There is a guy who has a house. Uh, I can’t remember the name of it. I’m sorry, but he has been building this weird house. It’s almost Gaudí-esque. Okay, you can tour his house, and it doesn’t have energy and doesn’t have, like, it’s just this. And he’s. So that’s a you go see that and you’re like, this is so crazy that you know, that somebody would do this. But, uh, it’s, it’s really popular, things like that all the time. There’s obviously murals all over the city that people tour that we just opened a brand new visitor center downtown and love that facility. And it’s an old historic building. It was the Studebaker dealership back in the 1920s. It was where USO dances were held during World War II. It has Mexican cultural history as well. The Mexican Elvis used to play there a lot in the fifties or whatever. And like, music’s a big part of what we’re doing. There’s so many different kinds of music venues there, you know, um, one part of Austin is completely different than another part of Austin. So you can find the part of Austin that fits you best.

Billie: And what is an under the radar Austin part or destination that you’d send like a smart, well-traveled friend right now?

Tom: So that’s, that’s difficult. So I could probably give you three of them, but I will tell you like, uh, Rainey Street is just right across the street from the convention center. Um, and, you know, 20 years ago, if you haven’t been here, that was a Hispanic neighborhood, all these, you know, uh, 1920s–1930s little Tudor homes. And they became restaurants and bars and became an attraction. Now it’s called the Waterline building is the tallest building in the state of Texas. It’s just finishing right now. It’s got the one hotel in the basement. It’s got office space, got condo. That trail I told you about, it’s called the Confluence. And that’s you go through, and there’s all kinds of trees now. There’s some bridges go over that. So you have this nature setting in this neighborhood right across the street from the convention center, and there’s all kinds of restaurants. And when I moved back ten years ago to Austin with my wife, who was a Texas Longhorn. We walked out of the building and said, where can we go eat there? Like you’re in Rainey? Go down to the corner and turn right. There’s fifty restaurants down there. Like we had no idea. So if you haven’t been there in a while, that’s all new. And then you go to like South Congress, and South Congress is all these great little boutique hotels, but it’s also all these great restaurants and Hermes and, you know, things like, wow, has South Congress changed. And that’s a cool area. So there’s, there’s just a lot of kind of hidden gems in Austin and new things that have happened in Austin. I don’t know if they’re under the radar, but they’re just new.

Billie: It sounds like a lot of fun.

Tom: Yeah, it’s a great city.

Billie: Since you’re leading a lot of these charges, a lot of change that’s happening in Austin. What’s something that you’ve tested in the past year, whether it was in marketing or partnerships or like an experience that you think other destinations could learn from?

Tom: Well, I think because of our TPID, we are just doing a lot more advertising and marketing than we could ever do before. I will tell you that during Covid we probably got down to $4 million as a budget and laid off a lot of our staff. It was a terrible time, and we had, I think, $160,000 one year to do all of our marketing for the year during. It was terrible. Right? And then now the TPID comes along and our budgets recovered. And like in the past, we used to just do summer campaign and maybe a small winter campaign. Now we’re advertising year round in all of our major markets, secondary markets, drive markets. And so we’re testing a lot of new sales and marketing strategies that we weren’t able to do before, which is great because of that TPID and in different markets and we’re doing different things with our TPID than others have done before. I don’t want to almost talk about it because I don’t want anybody to start competing with us on it. But, um, but it’s really making a difference for some of our limited service hotels, some of the activities that we were not able to do before. If you think about what are we doing that’s different? Well, I don’t know many cities that have tore down their entire convention center rebuilding it from scratch. And so we’re spending 40 months, you know, I think probably five years from now, somebody is going to call me and say, hey, we’re doing what you guys did. We’re rebuilding our heart. What’s your playbook? So we’re testing a lot of new strategies right now.

Billie: Do you partner with organizations in your area?

Tom: We do a lot of events with Seattle.

Billie: Why Seattle?

Tom: Music Town? The folks that are building our convention also built the Seattle Convention Center. They’re a music capital. We’re a music capital. We don’t compete that often with Seattle, you know, but we’re very similar in scope.

Billie: So music, tech, yeah.

Tom: All that. Right. So it makes great sense for us to do events together.

Billie: Yeah. That’s great. That’s really smart. Tom, thank you so much for being here.

Tom: Thanks for having me. I’m so excited. Like, listen, they pay me to talk about Austin. So thank you for this. I appreciate that.

Billie: And they pay me to get to hear about it, which I love to do. So thank you so much for joining us.

Tom: I’m glad to have this opportunity with you guys here at US Travel at IPW. And thank you for the time. And just let us talk about our city that we love.

Billie: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll see you in Austin. We’ll get some brisket tacos.

Tom: Breakfast brisket.

Billie: Breakfast brisket. Say that five times fast.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of View from Afar. In the show notes, you’ll find links to everything we discussed today, as well as Visit Austin’s website and social media handles and our recent coverage of Austin on Afar, and be sure to follow along this week to hear more interviews with industry experts.

You can find more Views from Afar on Afar.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We’re @AfarMedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great interviews. Subscribing always makes that easy, and be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other travelers find it.

This has been View From Afar, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland, with assistance from Michelle Baran and me, Billie Cohen. Music composition from Epidemic Sound. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to its other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers podcast.