Tourism Talk blog

A report released Aug. 18 by GRCVB revealed that Wake County welcomed 15.8 million visitors in 2021, a 23% increase over 2020. These nearly 16 million visitors who traveled to Wake County spent $2.3 billion in our community, a 40% increase over 2020. After numbers declined in 2020, both visitation

GRCVB hosted its 35th Annual Meeting on Thurs., Aug. 18, 2022, at A.J. Fletcher Opera Theater at Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts. Here’s a summary of the meeting... GRCVB Board of Directors chair Mark Zimmerman reported top-line 2021 and 2022 tourism numbers. At the close of the...

For the last few months, we have been posting blogs and sending emails in anticipation of the The Kennedy Center's Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD ® ) Conference being hosted in downtown Raleigh from Aug. 1-5, 2022. Many local hospitality stakeholders and partners have...

Featuring: Adam Sa cks is president of Tourism Economics, an Oxford Economics company dedicated to analytically-based consulting to the tourism sector. For more than two decades, Adam has worked with destinations, industry associations and companies around the world in the areas of opportunity and

We believe there are some people in our area whom every hospitality partner ought to know (or at least know about). Today we want to introduce you to Ed Tomasi, cofounder of Subnation and an integral part of our area's strategy to position Greater Raleigh as the first-choice destination for...

Like it did with virtually everything else, the pandemic affected implementation of the 10-year Destination Strategic Plan (DSP) we launched in 2018. Some of the eight priorities in the DSP had to be shuffled in 2020, some received different levels of focus this fiscal year than originally expected,

New year, new channel. Today we're sharing the first "Tourism Talk: The Podcast," what we hope will be a regular part of the Tourism Talk lineup. In this inaugural edition, GRCVB executive vice president Loren J. Gold reports on North Carolina's recent esports tax incentive...

For many of you, this will be a reintroduction to Jessica because you already know her from her eight years at GRCVB. Jessica Holt was recently promoted from a manager role to director of GRCVB's Public Relations and International Tourism Department. She's a shining example of a crop of...

With 2021 winding down, here are 21 things in the Greater Raleigh sports tourism industry that I’m thankful for as we head into the holiday season: 1. Our GRSA staff. You won’t find a better or more hard-working group anywhere in America. That would be Tori Collins, Jason Philbeck,...

Just up the road from our downtown Raleigh office, within a brick building surrounded by longleaf pine trees, the future leaders of the tourism industry are hard at work. Grounded in sustainable natural and cultural resource research, N.C. State’s Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management...