Smaller Crowds, Higher Holiday Visitation in Grapevine’s Historic District

It’s been months since City Staff cleaned up the last of their decorations here in the Christmas Capital of Texas, but we’re only just starting to understand the impact of their hard work. Around this time last year, we published an eye-popping report on the impact of this community’s seasonal activations… and the record-breaking crowds we hosted in 2023. While continuous growth and new records are worth celebrating, residents and policymakers asked a valuable question:

Should we be trying to make our events bigger each year? Or should we focus on making them better?

Naturally, employees at Grapevine Parks and Recreation as well as the Convention & Visitor’s Bureau had plenty of ideas for sustaining the magic without overtaxing our infrastructure. They spent most of 2024 planning and strategizing. Then, with guidance from residents and at the direction of City Council, they put those plans into motion.  Now, we’re leveraging data from Placer.ai to tell you whether they succeeded or not.

Santa Claus (and 21k Friends) Arrive in Town

Here in Grapevine, the 40-day holiday cycle officially starts with the Carol of Lights, a street lighting ceremony featuring complimentary entertainment options that closes down all of Main Street. Without cars on the road, the Historic District can accommodate tens of thousands of visitors for the event… but fitting them in and serving them well are two different things. In 2023, attendees expressed concern about freedom of movement and proximity to the passenger rail line, which operates throughout the event (and, indeed, supplies a good portion of attendees). So the team made a few changes to open up space.

Multiple event stages gave everyone a chance to participate without having to crowd into a single area, Main Street itself was left open as a pedestrian thoroughfare, and vendors offering activities as well as food were clustered on auxiliary streets to draw the crowds into a broader area while giving everyone plenty of room to operate. Crucially, the marketing budget for the event was also strategically reduced.

Those changes worked perfectly, reducing crowds on Main Street by 30% while shifting the visitor share back toward locals. Some zip codes, marked in purple on the map above, even saw numerical growth from 2023 to 2024. Surveys turned into the Parks Department were overwhelmingly positive, netting an overall rating of 4/5 stars.

Turning Weekenders into Day Trippers

Aside from the Carol of Lights, Main Street’s largest seasonal event is the Merry & Bright Drone Show. In 2023, the Parks Department hosted three iterations of that event on Saturday nights, drawing an average of 38,482 estimated visits per event with a peak attendance twice the size of the most recent Carol of Lights. Those crowds, too, prompted concerns about capacity: how are small businesses supposed to serve more customers than they have square feet of space?

Based on input from the Historic Downtown Grapevine Association and ongoing foot traffic patterns in the area, City leaders decided to shift the Merry & Bright Drone Show to Monday nights, relieving pressure from the already-bustling Saturday crowds and injecting energy into a night of the week that usually sees reduced activity. Once again, the effort paid off: average crowds were cut to a more manageable 17,956 estimated visitors; a massive surge compared to the average Monday night in downtown Grapevine!

Comparing the first Monday of December 2023 to the first Monday of December 2024 shows the value of that change: visits to Main Street more than doubled year-over-year, only to almost triple the next week! Those strategic adjustments – combined with the fact that Christmas fell in the middle of the week last year – helped shift the overall crowd share massively toward Sunday and Monday nights in 2024, spreading holiday traffic more efficiently throughout the season. Weekends remained the most popular days to visit, with December 14 and the weekend of December 21-23 accounting for four of the area’s five busiest days all year, but the total share of visitors on those high-use days fell to more manageable levels.

Losing the Bustle without Missing a Beat

Due to a variety of economic and political factors, leisure travelers became more budget conscious in 2024, resulting in small market retractions and an increased focus on near-destination travel. Placer analysis of our top convention centers, and hotels, for example, show a 12% drop in total visits from 2023 to 2024. But, as a whole, Grapevine weathered the storm. Grapevine Mills, which offers destination entertainment for the region alongside attractive retailers for every budget, recorded a modest 2% jump in foot traffic for the calendar year. On the whole, patterns around the City indicate a more budget-conscious consumer… which makes the strategic realignment of crowds in the Historic District even more impressive. 

The area we studied within the Historic District saw a modest decline in visits for the majority of the year, but still welcomed more people in the final six weeks of 2024 than it hosted in the same timespan for 2023. Even though the major activation crowds shrank, the overall appeal of the area held strong. In fact, its likely those visitors had a less stressful and overall more wondrous experience than they would have if they were packed into a massive crowd, competing for table space or waiting for their photo ops in the cold.

A review of industry types most commonly visited before and after the Historic District reveals the same thing: consumers were more likely to frequent affordable quick-service restaurants than the year prior, but pulled away from both hospitality and full-service restaurants. In fact, the average household income for all visitors in the area decreased from 2023 to 2024; most likely indicating a rise in the share of budget-conscious families choosing Grapevine for their seasonal entertainment.

Given the strategic focus of local leaders on increasing the quality of events in the area while reducing strain on our infrastructure, these trends are overwhelmingly positive. Main Street retained its reputation as a holiday destination, welcoming modest growth in total visitors while preventing crowd surges that would have created a more stressful user experience for guests. Quite simply, the Christmas Capital of Texas made holiday memories more accessible than ever in a year that brought the majority of consumers uncertainty and restraint.

For more analysis and stories from our community, listen to the ‘Growing Grapevine’ podcast here on our site or with your favorite streaming app. You can also find us on social media, reach out directly to staff, or join our monthly newsletter for ongoing updates about the City of Grapevine.