Heath Dillard

THE STORY

Reinvesting in Home: Heath Dillard on Visitors, Neighbors, and the Tourism Dividend

"How can welcoming visitors help communities become more prosperous, distinctive, and connected?"

That's the question Heath Dillard has built his career around, and the one he's bringing to TEDxUnityPark 2026.

Heath isn't just talking about tourism, he runs it here. As President and CEO of VisitGreenvilleSC, he has led Greenville's visitor economy to record levels, including a $2.5 billion economic impact in 2025. Since he took over, Greenville hosted the inaugural MICHELIN Guide American South ceremony and was picked as a featured destination for Top Chef Season 23. At this year's TEDxUnityPark, his talk "The Tourism Dividend" takes on an argument a lot of cities are stuck in, visitors versus residents, and asks whether we've set it up wrong from the start.

"Strategic, intentional reinvestment of tourism's benefits can cause the line between great place to visit and great place to live to disappear."

Heath's road to Greenville ran through Charlotte. "I spent the last 18 years before that living in Charlotte, North Carolina, ten years working in tourism in Charlotte," he says. That decade at the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority covered nearly every corner of the job, from research and brand to the visitor experience itself. The whole time, he was keeping an eye on the Upstate.

"Both family and friends have continued to call the upstate home," he said during TEDxUnityPark Media Day. "I've been watching personally and professionally Greenville's growth over the last decade and a half, and I was excited to get to play a small role in its continued growth in the future."

In 2022, Heath came back and took the helm at VisitGreenvilleSC.

"I really think about what we do as community building. The fact that we get to leverage tourism in an effort to do that is a bonus."

That's the part that stuck with us. "So we get to work with artists, we get to work with chefs, we get to work with those who build great experiences," he says, "and to be able to drive both economic and quality of life in a place that we call home."

That brings us to the fight his talk is built to settle. "There's a lot of places around the country that are battling between... tourism and residents and over tourism and resident quality of life," he said at Media Day. "And my talk is about how we're getting that conversation wrong."

"It's called the tourism dividend. It's about how do we leverage tourism in an effort to make where we call home higher quality of life and a better place to live for our residents?"

Heath doesn't buy the either/or. "And, both!" as he puts it. "Communities don't have to be either great places to live or tourism magnets." The places that get it right, he writes, "use the value created by visitors to strengthen the things residents already care about: local businesses, arts and culture, sports and live entertainment, food, parks, trails, public spaces and community experiences."

If you've ever waited for a table downtown on a Saturday night and been glad that same spot is still open on a slow Tuesday, you've felt a little of what he means.

Heath talks the way he works: clear, prepared, a step ahead of the question. Under all the numbers, he's a guy who's proud of home. Greenville has been recognized by Condé Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure on his watch, and the South Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association named him its 2026 Outstanding Community Service Leader.

TEDxUnityPark's 2026 theme is Multiply, and honestly, a dividend might be the most Multiply idea on the lineup. Visitors come, the money goes back into the things that make this place worth living in, and those same things bring the next round of visitors. Heath calls it "a reinforcing cycle of prosperity." We'd just call it compounding, Greenville style.

His timing is good, too. "Greenville's growth is really at an inflection point," he says.

"Our community's already announced a downtown conference center and a major hotel that's going to come alongside that. That will give us the assets that we need to attract the kind of conferences, the kind of group events and the kind of meetings that will put Greenville on a completely different map."

What many don't know about Heath is that he shows up ready to make the editor's life easy. When Evan told him how efficient he was, he had the reason ready. "I can elaborate, but I'm trying to give you cuts, you know, that you can spot," he said. As the guys cutting the footage, we appreciated it.

We think this talk will change how a lot of people look at the out-of-town plates on Main Street. Every visitor, in Heath's telling, is also an investment in the place we call home.

"Yes, it's millions and billions of dollars and economic impact, but it's more than that. It's a higher quality for the residents who live in Greenville."