An audacious new plan by Visit Denver projects the city will by the year 2025 be attracting 50 million annual visitors, about half of them staying overnight and spending $9 billion in their wake.

The Denver Tourism Roadmap — unveiled Tuesday at the convention bureau’s annual meeting — charts the next decade of tourism growth. The plan aims to grow total visitation to 50 million from 28.4 million, increase the number of overnight visitors from 16.4 million to 25 million and grow the spending by those overnight visitors by $4 billion.

“With Denver’s growing supply of new hotel rooms, airline seats, restaurants and attractions, it’s hard to overstate the significance of tourism as an economic driver,” Visit Denver president Richard Scharf said in a statement. “The Denver Tourism Roadmap provides a smart growth strategy to drive demand for new tourists while enhancing the quality of life for our residents.”

“Responsible tourism” is the new buzz for tourism cheerleaders in Colorado. It’s not about just any heads in beds. It’s about the right heads. The Colorado Tourism Office is pushing sustainable tourism as a way to direct the state’s swelling number of visitors and vacationing residents toward the overlooked corners of the state.

Visit Denver’s plan hinges on the planned expansion of the Colorado Convention Center and the National Western Center, as well as signature events to lure more overnight visitors. Attracting more business travelers attending conferences and vacationers hitting events like the Great American Beer Festival are cornerstones of the new strategy.

Other highlighted components among the 70 initiatives planned for the next decade include promoting the city’s attractions and creating branded tours showcasing the city’s culture; expanding international air service and improving connections between downtown and Denver’s neighborhoods; improving the 16th Street Mall experience and bolstering the city’s brand as a vacation destination.

The roadmap was developed over a year, using more than 1,000 interviews with meeting planners, convention attendees, tour operators and Denver residents. The study identified current tourism trends — like millennials shaping the future of travel, destination brands shaped more by visitors on social media than marketers and travelers seeking customized experiences — to craft the strategy for growth for one of the state’s strongest and fastest growing industries.

“Denver’s brand is slowly evolving to being a progressive society that is innovative and entrepreneurial, but the city still battles old perceptions and new societal concerns that are potentially creating new negative perceptions,” reads the study, mentioning “unintended consequences” of marijuana legalization. “Denver needs to find a way to embrace these new perceptions making them advantageous for the city.”