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Last year it was Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and President George Bush exploring Graceland. This year, it’s a tourist invasion expected to break all records during the 30th anniversary Elvis Week.

Hotel rooms are booking up three months in advance, and sellouts of some of the major events of Aug. 11-19 are turning Memphis into what the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau calls one of the hottest tourist tickets in the country this summer.

Elvis Presley Enterprises chief executive officer Jack Soden said the 25th Elvis anniversary in 2002 broke all previous records with an estimated 75,000 tourists in town. He realized the 30th could be even bigger when tickets went on sale for the anniversary concert at FedExForum. “For the 25th anniversary, we spent all summer selling tickets to the concert. This one sold out without even trying.”

When the 12,500-seat concert sold out, EPE decided to book a second but different concert the same night. It added a midnight show called “Midnight In Vegas” based on Elvis’ popular midnight concerts in Las Vegas. Like the sold-out 8 p.m. concert, the Vegas show includes former Elvis band members performing live as accompaniment to concert footage of Elvis.

Soden attributes interest this year to the milestone 30th year, to aggressive marketing including a new nationwide advertising campaign, and to such wild-card enthusiasm-building moments as the Koizumi-Bush visit and its worldwide saturation media coverage.

“Elvis is getting bigger all over the world. We say it, and I know it sounds like a company fight song, but it’s true, ” says Soden, who helped open Graceland as a tourist attraction in 1982 and has helped steer it to national landmark status with annual events such as the iconic candlelit pilgrimage to the Elvis grave site.

This year, the tourism quotient is boosted by the first Elvis Tribute Artist contest with Elvis performers competing worldwide to become finalists in an Elvis Week showdown. Twenty-four festivals, from one in Elvis’ Tupelo birthplace to one in Queenstown, Australia, are holding their own competitions with the finalists holding preliminary rounds here Aug. 12.
Like an Elvis version of “American Idol, ” the finale will be Aug. 17 at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts.

“There are scores of tribute artists who have themselves developed quite a following of friends, fans and families, and those fan groups will follow them to Memphis, ” says Soden. While there are 24 signed up so far this year, he said the tribute artist competition may expand to 40 or more in the future.

Bush and Koizumi aside, tourism to Graceland was down last year to roughly 554,000 visitors from an annual average of roughly 600,000. “We’re going to be up significantly this year. We’re running about double-digit increases, ” says Soden, who attributes last year’s decline to the initial shock of high gas prices and to lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina. When a major attraction like New Orleans shuts down, tour brokers tend to steer tour groups to other areas of the country altogether, he said.

Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau president Kevin Kane says Katrina effects are not significant at this point. “The hotels are filling up, and we anticipate a lot of hotels that week will be full.” Tour bookings are up. “Where there were two planeloads (in 2002), there are three. Where there were three busloads, there are five.”

Shelby County has 21,000 hotel rooms, and the Tunica casinos have 7,000. Memphis Hotel & Lodging Association chairman Wayne Tabor, general manager of the Holiday Inn Select Downtown, said demand for rooms “is the biggest I’ve seen in the past two milestone events (the 20th and 25th Elvis anniversaries).” Tabor said hotels usually hold out a few rooms for corporate clients, so they are not technically sold out. “But I think it’s going to be a record breaker. A lot of the demand is coming from overseas, particularly in the UK. British tourists (to Graceland) are big even in the off years.”

EPE also has sold out general admission tickets to some of its smaller Elvis Week attractions, including its annual Elvis Insiders Conference with appearances by former Elvis friends, co-stars and collaborators. This year’s conference includes Priscilla Presley, actress and former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley and singer-songwriter Mac Davis.

Adding to the mix this year, Graceland has scheduled two nights of music and movies on the lawn of Graceland Aug. 13-14 with performers Andy Childs and The Dempseys kicking the nights off with 7 p.m. concerts. The music will be followed by screenings of “Viva Las Vegas.”

Kane said the Convention & Visitors Bureau won’t know until September how the summer compares to past seasons. “But we’re off to a great start. We’ve had a great Memphis In May, and Graceland is taking everything to a new level. I absolutely think it’s got the potential for the biggest Elvis week and our biggest summer ever.”
- Michael Lollar: 529-2793