Tourism Talk blog

Invitations for the 2019 GRCVB Annual Meeting are in the mail queue (both snail mail and email). If you haven’t gotten yours already, be watching for it to appear in the next few days. We love Annual Meeting season around here because it’s our chance to show area hospitality partners,...

Hospitality tax stakeholders City and County leaders hosted a hospitality tax stakeholders meeting at Marbles Kids Museum on June 19. I would like to congratulate the County Manager and Raleigh City Manager and their staffs on developing the proposal and for the transparency of the process. I

There were some important staff announcements out of the Greater Raleigh Sports Alliance office recently that Wake County partners need to know. ....... Raleigh, N.C. – The Greater Raleigh Sports Alliance (GRSA) has promoted Tori Collins to director and Jason Philbeck to associate director....

Raleigh, N.C., has seen exponential growth in its beer scene over the past decade, and with the recent signing of House Bill 363, the Craft Beer Distribution and Modernization Act, Wake County and North Carolina breweries are poised to grow even more with their sales. From a visitation standpoint,

At GRCVB, there seems to be a cycle of buzzwords that we use in our meetings and hallway conversations. In the last year or two, I have heard master plan, disruption, deep dive and "move the needle" tossed around quite a bit. One phrase that has always been around but that we’re...

We continue to make progress on Destination 2028. Esports and event metrics Esports was a major opportunity under the Sports priority of the Destination Strategic Plan (DSP). I'm pleased to report that we have booked our first esports event, which will bring in more than 3,500 competitors and

We’re happy to announce that the 2019‒2020 edition of the Official Visitors Guide to Raleigh, Cary and Wake County has been provided to the printer. We expect the Visitors Guides to ship mid-May, and you should start seeing them by late May. Here are a few notes about this year's...

Last month, my report included updates about Wake County Hospitality Tax Review stakeholders meetings. Two additional meetings have taken place since then. On Feb. 28, 2019: Raleigh Convention Center presented the need for improvements at Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts and the

In our ongoing effort to keep our partners and other stakeholders “in the loop” about notable and recent developments which affect tourism, we are publishing monthly updates from president and CEO Dennis Edwards. Here are highlights from Denny for February: We are pleased to announce...

In the first Tourism Talk post of 2019, we outlined the three talking points GRCVB will be reiterating in much of our communication this year. The first of those and perhaps the most important is the Value of Tourism. We explained in detail why tourism matters to Wake County in the second post of