Branson Landing Marks First Anniversary
By: Angie Weidinger
Updated: June 15, 2007
The Branson Landing is marking its first successful year of business, but not everyone in the The Branson Landing is doing very well with seven more restaurants slated to open in the next several months. But, it seems a lot of tourists to the area are passing up the old to go to the new. The visitors to the Branson Landing are coming from all over the “With all of the publicity of the Landing, we're getting a lot of new visitors to A lot of them just want to see what they’ve heard so much about. “When we were in Eureka Springs, we had people ask what we were doing and they mentioned The Landing by the River and we thought we'd check it out for ourselves,” said Lisa Slagle who was visiting Branson from Since the Landing opened one year ago, an estimated 4.9 million people have visited the shopping, restaurant and fountain area. “Our parking lots are full and it’s working,” said Huffman. “It's fun to see all of the people coming here.” Businesses up the hill from the Landing aren’t in such a good mood. “There's been a decrease in profits for downtown merchants,” said Gayla Roten, executive director of the Downtown Branson Main Street Association. “We're completely different with mom and pop shops. We just have to make sure that when people come they experience us as well as everything else in Branson.” The shoppers we found passed up the downtown experience because it was too busy. “If traffic wasn't so bad, we would've pulled over,” said Slagle. And that’s something downtown businesses are working on to try to flow along with the Branson Landing’s sky-high success. “This summer is exploding with all of the tourism from the new people coming into town,” said Huffman. Just a few weeks ago, a trolley started running that takes tourists from the Landing up the hill to the historic downtown. That eliminates the parking problems and many hope it will bring more customers into the older stores.
