TULSA, Okla. — There's plenty of horsing around at Expo Square this week with the National Arabian & Half-Arabian Championships.
The first major event to follow the Tulsa State Fair is hardly an afterthought if you ask Tulsa Regional Tourism.
"This show in and of itself is 5,500 attendees that come here. They're here for ten days," Tulsa Regional Tourism President Renee McKenney said. "They're bringing over 7,100 hotel room nights."
2 News went straight to the horse's mouth to get the economic report Tuesday from both McKenney and Arabian Horse Association President Deborah Johnson, who oversees more than 1,700 horses and their trainers in the event.
"We bring about $25 million of value to this city," Johnson told 2 News. "From what I can hear and what the staff are telling me, everything's going great. Exhibitors I've talked to throughout the day today have been very happy."
In the stables are Rebecca Marr and Chloe Harper, who each showed champion horses around the country for Colonial Wood Training Center. Marr, a 2023 OSU graduate, said she looks forward to the competitions in Tulsa every year.
"We usually go to a lot of restaurants around here, so that's probably the main thing we all do, is we all go out to dinner at night. But usually when we get here it's all business," Marr said.
Tulsa Regional Tourism said the city needs this spectacle. And the championship event says it needs Tulsa. It's a partnership that is contracted to continue each year through at least 2026.
"It's really a mutually beneficial relationship between us and Tulsa," Johnson said. "We've been coming here now for 16 years."
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