One of the benefits of being part of the Wake County hospitality community and a partner of GRCVB is the free listing every area business gets on visitRaleigh.com. (As an aside, the website garners almost three million uses every year, and some of those user eyeballs are landing on your listings.) That's why we recommend that our partners login regularly to PIXL (the Bureau's Partner Information eXchange Login, the back door to visitRaleigh.com) and monitor the content and accuracy of your listing.

Here's another reason.

We often curate listings for hotels, restaurants, attractions, service providers and other partners and provide them to meeting planners and attendees, sports event attendees, the media etc.

For example, we are now about to launch a new tool, targeted for meeting attendees but accessible to everyone. We're calling it the Foodie Downtown interactive restaurant map, Foodie Downtown for short. This tool will replace what has been known as the Hanging Around Downtown (HAD) map, a printed piece that we have maintained for the last dozen years with details about the 50-70 restaurants closest to the Raleigh Convention Center.

The HAD map has been a fan favorite and has been placed in the hands of hundreds of thousands of meeting attendees during those years. But it is almost 2022, and in the spirit of sustainability and because Raleigh is one of the most tech-savvy cities on the planet, it was well past time to retire the printed HAD map in lieu of an always-current digital version.

So the Foodie Downtown map was born. This is the first of a series of area maps that we will curate for many parts of Wake County. It is also why it is more important than ever for partners to get into the habit of checking your listings. The Foodie Downtown map, showcasing all restaurants in the downtown Raleigh boundary, will be promoted to every Bureau-booked meeting planner with attendees downtown in the coming months.

That means a restaurant listing on visitRaleigh.com may be viewed by tens of thousands of additional meeting attendees in the next year. (Note that GRCVB's maps and tools are not the same as the Downtown Raleigh Alliance's. The data exists in separate databases and is promoted to differing target audiences.)

To make sure that your public listing is current, no matter your industry or where you are in the county, we encourage you to login to PIXL and check your listing (or take a moment now to specifically assign one of your staff to do so). Please make sure all of the information displayed there (including amenities/attributes) is correct and current. And please make sure you have up-to-date and high-quality photos posted on your account. The photos will go a long way to encouraging viewers to visit your place of business. If you do not have PIXL access to your business, please email GRCVB marketing manager Andrew H. Baker at abaker@visitRaleigh.com.

Just a note—if you look at the Foodie Downtown map, you will see that some restaurants appear under a Featured Listing banner, which moves them to the top. Those are businesses that have purchased this preferred location on visitRaleigh.com. For more information about purchasing this and other online ad space, contact our rep, Lia Wik at Destination Travel Network, at 520.989.8071.
Just so you know, by default, your listing with GRCVB is always free.

We hope restaurant patronage generated from the new Foodie Downtown Interactive Restaurant map and the others coming down the road will be a great benefit for you as we (slowly) return to normal.