The 2026-2027 Official Visitors Guide to Raleigh, Cary and Wake County is the last piece of its kind that our Bureau will produce: that guide will continue in circulation throughout this fiscal year. We’re stepping back from annual magazine production with our custom publisher Compass Media in order to reimagine what kind of GRCVB print piece best serves the destination’s core audiences for 2027-2028.

The current Official Visitors Guide had a print run of 70,000 copies. Despite additional viewership for its online counterpart at www.raleighvisitorsguide.com, the readership of any CVB print publication today pales in comparison to annual usage of the official tourism website (around three million visits last year). Complicating matters more, an ever-increasing percentage of trip plans being generated on consumers’ AI model of choice means that even visitRaleigh.com now must be reevaluated (and a redesign project is currently underway!) to position its content for a new era of information consumption.

GRCVB will produce a publication next spring, and our Marketing and Communications team has started to conceptualize how that new piece may look and function when used for info fulfillment with retargeted audiences, mostly consisting of arriving groups (conventions and sports events) whom the Bureau has booked for Wake County and thus will be servicing. At this time our concepts suggest it won’t contain advertising.

We really appreciate our Official Visitors Guide advertisers, almost all of which reaped rewards in brand exposure and visitation by reserving space year after year, through multiple iterations of tourism content (it was a major leap when listing grids of restaurants and hotels disappeared from our guide) and through several custom publishers. In recent years, a number of print advertisers already had diversified their ad mix by placing visitRaleigh.com ads as well. We urge the remaining advertisers to consider it this year, with the same budgets that otherwise would have been devoted to our print publication.

The municipalities in Wake County are our biggest stakeholders in tourism development as well as advertisers in the magazine through a longstanding editorial arrangement for “places” deserving of special coverage. The continued need for special callouts to town tourism is something our team will factor into GRCVB’s new fulfillment piece for the spring and also something we’re emphasizing with our redesigned tourism website.

Look for a new area map and new navigation for the content specific to visiting each municipality when visitRaleigh.com relaunches later this fiscal year (and we still want to cover there the latest hyperlocal trends in concert with our municipal partners)! A real pleasure for me over the past year has been meeting individually with each marketing/communications professional working on behalf of our 12 municipalities countywide; the plan is to keep checking in annually (and more frequently) about next steps in destination brand marketing we’ve identified and for additional CVB content updates.

For all our marketing partners across the area, the Bureau’s purpose is to weave your unique attributes and stories into a compelling brand message that ultimately builds visitor traffic to Wake County. It’s our responsibility this year to optimize the Official Visitors Guide publication into a format that more effectively supports the mission.

As GRCVB print communication rightsizes, let’s intensify our efforts to work together strategically at attracting/improving circulation of the county’s millions of annual visitors—circulation that will bring customers to your doorstep, no matter your district, neighborhood or ZIP code. Much of the partner collaboration in 2027-2028 will be online (or AI-related). If you are interested in showcasing your partner business on visitRaleigh.com beyond a basic listing, please review the Official Media Kit.