Tourism Talk blog

As we have reported throughout fall 2020 and into 2021, GRCVB was grateful to have received CARES Act funding through Wake County. We have written in previous Tourism Talk posts about how the funds were allotted for four, significant tourism projects during that time. One of those projects that is

Each year since revamping its community engagement strategies officially in 2018, GRCVB has arranged its communications with local community stakeholders around annual themes of import, and this year is no different. In calendar years 2019 and 2020, Bureau staff created and implemented a multilevel

In the last Tourism Talk blog post of 2020, we asked the GRCVB staff to reflect on 2020 and share the lessons they have learned, especially as related to tourism and the work we all do. You can read their responses here. Now in this first blog post of 2021, we asked them an opposite question and we

Do you remember that old Mac Davis song "Happiness is (an unnamed Texas city) in the Rearview Mirror"? We're going to paraphrase it to "Happiness is 2020 in the Rearview Mirror." With the end of this unexpected and unprecedented year in front of us and vaccines loaded onto...

It's hard to find employees these days who stay with the same organization for decades. Long gone are the days when staffers spent their entire careers in the same job and retired in their sixties with the customary gold watch and a retirement party. But we have a rarity in our mix in that...

You may already know that GRCVB was the recipient, through Wake County, of $1.25 million in CARES Act funding, designated specifically for post-COVID tourism-related recovery through Dec. 30, 2020. We have been completely transparent in how the Bureau has put CARES Act money to work, in

About this time every year (at least for the last three years), we have published a “Reasons to be Thankful for Visitors” Tourism Talk blog. (It is the season, after all.) In 2019, we noted 700+ reasons to be grateful for visitors and what they bring to Wake County. Within that number...

One of the important responsibilities that GRCVB bears for Wake County is the collection and constant monitoring of tourism-related statistics. As you can imagine during the past year, we have seen some jubilant highs and jarring lows as tourism numbers, across the board, have been reported. As is

The GRCVB team has worked hard to be diligent and creative in the way we do our jobs during the pandemic. The situation has required us to rethink and reinvent many of the tactics we use to promote Raleigh, N.C., to leisure visitors, sports event planners and especially convention planning

Everywhere we go these days, someone is taking our temperature. So this week, we are "taking the temperature" of GRCVB and of tourism in Wake County. We asked Dennis Edwards for his honest appraisal of the current pandemic situation from his role as president and CEO, its impact on the...