The Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer travel and tourism season. Corn Palace Director Doug Greenway says they are expecting a good summer. “Well we think we’re going to be up from 2022,” Greenway says. “As you know, 2021 was a record year for tourism and travel in South Dakota….sales, hotel stays. So we dropped about 24 percent from 2021. We expect to bounce back from that this year. The state expects a very good tourism year.”
He says numbers are already increasing. “We’ve had steady traffic at the Corn Palace. We’ve been getting 500-600 a day in the last three weeks.”
Greenway says Mitchell’s visitors come from all over the world. He says recently, “we’ve had California, Nebraska, Indiana, Minnesota, Germany, Finland, West Virginia, Texas, Kansas….so it’s literally all over the world.”
Up to a half a million people visit the Corn Palace each year.