Tourism Talk blog

It's always good to see deserving colleagues recognized for the quality of the work they do. That happened at GRCVB recently when two, relatively long-time department heads were promoted to vice presidents in their respective areas of responsibility. Jonathan Freeze, CDME, who has been director

In early Aug. 2022, the Raleigh Convention Center and downtown Raleigh hosted The Kennedy Center's Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD ® ) conference. The event brought several hundred leaders from around the country and parts of the world to Raleigh to talk about and work on...

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...

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 Duarte Morais, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at N.C. State. Dr. Morais is the cofounder of

We start planning GRCVB's Annual Meeting in February of each year, and in a task that is related to my role as creative director, I get to be project manager. As we have been planning, I have been thinking about similar meetings that are presented by our local hospitality partners and...

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

The City of Raleigh released a Request For Interest (RFI) on June 2, 2022, directed at developers who may be interested in building a full-service hotel or mixed-use properties on two key downtown Raleigh sites. This is a revised version of the Convention Hotel and Downtown Development project that

It doesn’t seem possible, but it was two-and-a-half years ago that GRCVB hosted its first accessibility training event for area business partners and stakeholders, All Access Wake County. We told you then that the All Access initiative was an important one for the destination, and at that...

So far, 2022 has been an exciting return to form for Raleigh and Wake County tourism. With outdoor sports events never having left, festivals bouncing back from dormant years prior and conventions/meeting groups returning en masse, leisure and group business, it seems, are back. And it's only...