Tourism Talk blog

Since the destination brand's refresh in 2015, we at GRCVB have made every effort to showcase as many local, passionate-minded makers as we possibly can. For the past seven-plus years, we have been working with many Wake County businesses to create a product inventory that GRCVB can use...

The beginning of a new year is always a good time to check in with community leaders, to ask about their plans and dreams for the next 12 months, what's on their minds, what keeps them up at night, and in our case, what do all hospitality partners and stakeholders need to know about the big...

As we do every year, we have collected thousands of images that relate to hospitality and tourism in Wake County during 2022. Added to the library this year were festivals/events, businesses, attractions and, most importantly, people, including the visitors and employees who make our area's

It's about this time of year that we start seeing the end of the year Top 10 lists—for example, top 10 news stories or top 10 scandals of 2022. We decided we'd be a part of that trend by serving up GRCVB's lists of top 10 resources we use or look to in our work that we think...

Resilience: (noun) re·​sil·​ience | \ ri-ˈzil-yən(t)s \ Specifically organizational resilience: the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions, to survive and prosper. In 2018-2019, our...

During the 2022 GRCVB Annual Meeting in August, president and CEO Dennis Edwards mentioned that the Bureau is participating in a comprehensive project to bring stability back to our hospitality workforce after the pandemic. "The City and County recently appropriated $1.25 million to Capital...

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

Since everyone else is heading back to school, we figured it was time for us, too, so we are bringing back live and in-person Tourism U classes, GRCVB's award-winning learning track for tourism and destination education. We launched Tourism U 100 Level in 2019 and tested several in-person...

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...

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