Visit Seattle and Airbnb are partnering to promote and broaden local-led Airbnb Experiences, which provide authentic, unique adventures for visitors.
Airbnb Experiences offer travelers unprecedented access to communities, places and activities they’d never have through traditional tourist travel, such as rowing through Seattle’s urban waterways with a Guinness World Record holder or visiting Ballard’s small neighborhood breweries with the director of a documentary about the local craft beer industry. With experiences and places to stay located throughout Seattle, Airbnb brings the economic benefits of tourism to neighborhoods that haven’t typically benefitted from visitor spending.
How are we doing? Pretty good. That was the bottom-line assessment that was shared with the nearly 600 tourism and professionals who attended Visit Seattle’s Annual Outlook Meeting at the Westin Seattle on March 31.
Some highlights from the 2021 study showed:
A big part of what imbues a destination with a sense of place and makes it memorable are its small locally owned businesses. A new partnership between Visit Seattle and Seattle Bank is designed to support these businesses and bring tourism revenue to Seattle’s emerging neighborhoods. The inaugural grant program will invest in 20 local businesses, focusing on establishments owned by women, people of color and LGBTQ+ community members in the easily accessible Central District and Chinatown-International District neighborhoods.
Over the years, any corporate event planner can admit to spending countless hours researching the perfect venue or vendors for their gatherings. After attending or hosting hundreds of events, New York-based Daphne Hoppenot was no stranger to this research and was frustrated by its repetitive nature. However, it was planning her wedding in 2018 that pushed her to realize the lack of resources in the corporate events market compared to the wedding industry, and set out to see if other meetings and events professionals were struggling with the same problem.