The welcome mat does more than scrape by.

• Position: Tourism industry

The Labor Day crowd had barely left, but Hulene Morgan was already counting strands of Christmas lights for Cannon Village square in Kannapolis. "In the past," she says, "a lot of areas didn't understand how important tourism was as a tool for economic development. Now we do."

Morgan is marketing director for the Williamsburg-style mall of retail outlets off Interstate 85. By fall, 50,000 visitors from 36 states and six foreign countries had signed the Cannon Village Visitor Center register.

In some ways, Cannon Village's numbers sum up state travel in 1995, says Ralph Peters, former director of the North Carolina Travel and Tourism Division. For many, it was a record 12 months. Foreign visitors and strong convention bookings offset fickle weather and, in the view of many in the hospitality business, the state's failure to adequately promote tourism.

Peters estimates that 1995 expenditures were up 6% from 1994, when travelers spent a total of $8.3 billion in the state. In total impact, that makes travel as important to the state as manufacturing and agriculture, boosters say. As with agriculture, that's no thanks to mother nature. Rain washed out the top snow-skiing weekend last January. Hurricane Felix sent coastal visitors scurrying in August. A few weeks later in the Piedmont, storms briefly closed Interstate 85.

"On a scale of one to 10, the year would have been an eight," says Brad Moretz, assistant general manager at Appalachian Ski Mountain in Blowing Rock. "We had 11 inches of rain on the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, our biggest of the year. When you have a 110-day revenue year and miss your biggest four days, it makes it tough." Moretz, secretary of the eight-member North Carolina Ski Areas Association, says Appalachian Ski had 87,000 visitors, compared with 1994's record 91,000. That was typical of the ski industry, which has an estimated annual impact of $80 million to $100 million. "We were probably at the high end of that," he adds.

On the coast, Carteret County Tourism Director Carol Lohr says June rain drove visitors off the beaches. But that meant a boon for retailers and museums. In Wilmington, the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II produced a 10% increase in visitors to the sound-and-light show at the USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. Inland, the N.C. Zoological Park in Randolph County opened a 200-acre North American exhibit, which Director David Jones says helped boost attendance by 330,000 to a...