BUFFALO, N.Y. — Visit Buffalo Niagara, our region's tourism agency, held its marketing outlook on Tuesday at the Buffalo Convention Center.
Tourism leaders say the region is recovering very quickly after the pandemic. This was Visit Buffalo Niagara's second annual forum to go over the strategy to promote tourism across Western New York. It ended around 1 o'clock Tuesday afternoon and allowed industry leaders to come up with ideas to get more people to visit.
"One of the opportunities is our winter season. That people don't necessarily think that they want to come to Buffalo during the winter, but we actually have some very fun activities especially when we have snow. Right now, all of our parks, the county parks are brimming with activities for people to do," said Visit Buffalo Niagara President and CEO Patrick Kaler.
Visit Buffalo Niagara's Patrick Kaler says hotel occupancy numbers are higher now than they were in 2019 before the pandemic. But meetings, conventions, and visits from Canadians are still lagging behind.
"So we're attracting newer visitors to our destination, and that's something that we're very excited about. The possibility of getting more New Yorkers out of New York City to Buffalo as well as some other growth potential markets such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, D.C.," said Patrick Kaler.
Tuesday, they talked about leveraging the strength of the arts and culture in our community to attract more visitors and conventions.
"Certainly it's a sports community, certainly it's a food community, certainly it's outdoor being on the waterfront, but it's also about all of the cultural experiences. The music, the museums, the galleries, the walking tours, the history, the heritage of Buffalo and being able to weave that message in a very succinct way to the right audience at the right time," said Richard Peterson, U.S Cultural and Heritage Marketing Council, President and CEO.
Kaler says site visits for people to see if they want to host their events here are up significantly. From January to September of last year, they hosted 29 site visits and booked 20 of them. 2019 saw only nine site visits.
"The Buffalo AKG really set the stage for us this year to tell a new story, and that's one of the things that in 2024, we're going to go out even strong with an arts and culture and architecture story," said Patrick Kaler.
Kaler says the data shows a lot of people are coming here because of Visit Buffalo Niagara's digital campaign through social media that targets people who live in the Northeast.
