New York City Tourism + Conventions is the official destination marketing organization and convention and visitors bureau for the five boroughs of New York City. Our mission is to maximize travel and tourism opportunities throughout the City, build economic prosperity and spread the dynamic image of NYC around the world.
New York City Tourism + Conventions is the official destination marketing organization and convention and visitors bureau for the five boroughs of New York City. Our mission is to maximize travel and tourism opportunities throughout the City, build economic prosperity and spread the dynamic image of NYC around the world.
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Fred Dixon
President and CEO
NYC & Company
Welcome to our 2023 Annual Report.
It is hard to believe that three years have passed since the pandemic halted most travel and leisure activities around the world, resulting in an unprecedented 65% decline in visitation to New York City.
Fortunately, we have since made huge strides toward recovery, and in 2022 we reached 85% of 2019 visitation levels. Spending, sector employment and economic impact also climbed back to the 85% range. The competitive environment, however, is making greater demands than ever on our marketing efforts. Our full recovery and a return to growth will require implementation of the strategies and investments you will read about in this report.
As you will discover in this document, the return of visitors across the City demonstrated the effectiveness of one-time incremental funding in 2021 and 2022, which fueled promotions and media reach for our campaigns and marketing programs.
With a constant focus on strategically driving leisure travel and business events, we made an impact for our members—businesses big and small—in neighborhoods in all five boroughs. NYC & Company was active throughout the year developing and delivering content that directly addresses the changing times in which we work. Celebrating the City’s diverse communities with award-winning stories, neighborhood insights, and a commitment to equity and accessibility in the industry and our organization, our efforts connected to local and global visitors in traditional media and emerging channels.
Our “always on” press and communications initiatives produced stories in dozens of languages, across hundreds of outlets in our most important markets. Thirty press conferences, 350 media visits, 17,000 influenced press stories and the reestablishment of international representation all proved key to the strategic and welcoming stories that reach millions of travelers and potential visitors.
Throughout 2022, the Convention Development and Tourism Development teams were back in action, attending trade shows, organizing sales missions and rebuilding our networks and relationships. FAM trips and reverse sales missions brought key decision makers and buyers into the City to see and experience the opportunities directly. New business leads, RFPs and committed dates and groups are the result.
As always, at the heart of our initiatives are the NYC & Company member businesses and organizations. Last year, 2022, saw the return of popular networking events that connect local businesses and create opportunities and a full calendar of education programs, including Tourism Ready, sustainable travel, accessible travel and new ways to engage with the market. Membership benefits included a new Monthly Tourism Barometer and frequent segment updates.
Now we look to new, dedicated and sustainable funding and marketing opportunities that will allow us to keep performing at the highest level for the industry. As the market changes, so must we. In 2023, we are introducing a new brand to meet this new moment. Its success will require a sustained promotional effort and close collaboration with our members and community, but we remain committed as always to shared success.
We look forward to working alongside you as New York City Tourism + Conventions to restore our industry’s economic prosperity and to continue growing the positive impact visitor spending makes across New York City.
As always, thank you for your partnership and support.
Charles Flateman
Chairman
New York City Tourism + Conventions
Executive Vice President
The Shubert Organization
Fred Dixon
President and CEO
New York City Tourism + Conventions
Our city, our culture and our industry have been impacted by profound change. This rebrand aims to evolve our sense of purpose and mission as we strengthen our relevance as the official tourism board for the five boroughs of New York City.
As representatives of the City to the world, we recognize that the role we play in supporting it and helping it thrive has never been more important. As business and leisure travel recover, our efforts to restore demand, rebuild the tourism economy and drive visitation into all five boroughs is critical to local businesses and residents alike.
We have reaffirmed our mission to best serve the future of the destination and to lead NYC’s tourism industry.
We have reassessed and reaffirmed our mission to best serve this city and lead NYC’s tourism industry. Through extensive research and feedback, we found our identity needed a clearer connection to tourism, a simplified brand architecture that integrated B2C and B2B seamlessly, a coherent visual identity independent of city government, a tone more authentic to NYC and a renewed commitment to spread the economic benefits of tourism across communities and boroughs. This effort had to start with us clarifying to all our audiences—visitors, residents, stakeholders and partners in government—who we are, what we do and how our work benefits the five boroughs in the most equitable and responsible ways possible.
This is why we are now New York City Tourism + Conventions. With our new brand system, we will strengthen our relevance as the official tourism board for the world’s greatest destination.
The tourism authority of the five boroughs of New York City.
The economy, culture and spirit of New York City are fueled by the constant flow of energy, ideas and activity of locals and visitors alike.
Our members and the broader tourism industry of New York City.
Official tourism representation of the five boroughs of NYC around the world.
Connection of the tourism and hospitality industries to government.
A vast membership representing every borough and sector of the City's tourism economy.
A wealth of data and insight on travel in NYC.
A complete ecosystem of promotion, tools and business building programs.
The support and partnership of City Hall.
To help make New York City the most vital, diverse, equitable, exciting, accessible, energetic, vibrant, creative, welcoming city on earth.
To invite the world and energize the City, building equitable, sustainable economic prosperity and community through tourism for the mutual benefit of residents, businesses and visitors.
Equity
Authenticity
Resilience
Vibrant
Welcoming
Real
Connection
Empowerment
Amplification
In recent years, New York City has had to put its core qualities on display. Difficult as they have been, the challenges of the pandemic also highlighted the strength, resilience, authenticity and beauty of the five boroughs around the globe.
As we roll out the new branding in the coming months, our mission remains to support New York City’s travel and tourism economy. In the process, we will continue to provide business and leisure visitors alike with a deeper, richer and more authentic experience of NYC. In so doing, we will seek out the support of New Yorkers themselves, actively engaging residents through a variety of activations and channels to assist all neighborhoods across the City in benefiting from inbound travel. Visitors and New Yorkers share an abiding love for New York City. They have an opportunity to help each other by coming together to amplify the benefits of exploring the City across all boroughs, communities, neighborhoods and businesses. It is our role to foster and facilitate that connection.
Our brand launch campaign will use new digital tools, platform strategies and technologies to provocatively curate, target, personalize and deliver local points of view on the best ways to participate in the awe and wonder of being a visitor in New York City, and directly support the local economy.
New York City is the greatest destination the world has ever produced. Ablaze at a distance, this town is lit up at street level with a trillion possible experiences at any given moment. This electric promise, five boroughs full, attracts day-trippers, bucket list-ers, sightseers, first-timers, on-the-regulars, frequent-fliers and meetings-and-convention-ers. They come for the buzz of being right where it’s all happening.
But what is happening? And where is it?
Well, that’s a matter of opinion. The must-try bagels, pizza, ramen, roti, Caribbean bake and sunrise coffee. The can’t-miss symphonies, DJs spinning vinyl, hip-hop haircuts, sonic oases and visual mosh pits. The best corner for this. The fastest route to that. The once-in-a-lifetime performances on Broadway, Off-Broadway and nowhere near Broadway in four other boroughs. The vibrant beaches, bodegas, dining rooms and dance halls. Which way to all the Little Italys, Indias, Brazils, Sri Lankas, Chinatowns, night markets, daytime discos and barrio barbecues? What cross streets for high-end streetwear, curated thrift and fabulous couture? What’s happening in Brooklyn? When in Queens? Where in Staten Island? Who in the Bronx? How in Manhattan?
Pound for pound, there is nothing better than a 100% authentic NYC point of view to help visitors navigate this abundance. And fortunately—we New Yorkers aren’t shy about sharing.
We are New York City Tourism + Conventions. As passionately opinionated New Yorkers ourselves, we know firsthand that the culture, spirit and economy of New York City fuel the constant flow of energy, ideas and activity of millions upon millions of perspectives. We rely on this “opinion power” to connect visitors to more profound and exhilarating NYC experiences across all five boroughs. By doing this, we help bring equitable, sustainable prosperity and community through tourism for the mutual benefit of all New Yorkers.
Our new website, launching in Phase 2 of the rebrand this spring, will offer a compelling way to experience NYC Tourism + Conventions. With immersive video to place potential visitors directly into the heart of New York City, as well as intuitive design and an enormous breadth of inspirational and wayfinding content, nyctourism.com will serve as our new calling card—a first point of contact for visitors, near and far, to explore what the City has to offer, plan their trips and learn about our diverse communities. The site will also feature redesigned and refreshed sections for our membership, meeting planners, the travel trade and the media, along with areas for other stakeholders—all enticing ways for our partners to engage with us.
The tourism and convention industry in New York City faced external challenges throughout 2022 ranging from economic uncertainty, inflationary pressures and the strong dollar to the ongoing risk of Covid-19. Even so, as was shown in the first two years of the pandemic, destination marketing and visitation in New York City is a case study in travel resurgence resting on creativity, energy and smart choices.
After nearly two full years of pandemic disruption, the industry’s recovery momentum was interrupted temporarily by a surge in Covid cases due to the Omicron variant. Through January and well into February 2022, shows were canceled or postponed, hotel demand fell and people preferred to stay at home. While the interruption turned out to be short-lived, it did influence key indicators.
Note: All figures, estimates and forecasts are subject to revision as conditions develop and additional data become available. Numbers may not sum due to rounding. Source: NYC & Company as of March 2023.
As we can see in the hotel data, the year started well below seasonal expectations. From near record lows in January (38% occupancy) and pandemic drops in room rates ($121), the hotel sector experienced steadily rising demand, returning and new inventory, rising occupancy rates and strong ADR increases. Traveling along seasonal trends, hotel indicators came back strongly. The year-end average occupancy rose to 74.4%, just 14% off pre-pandemic record levels. At the same time, ADR topped $286, 10% above 2019 peaks.
Looking at visitation performance for the full year, the results reinforce the strong signs of recovery. By December 2022, with domestic visitation still responding to a major investment in advertising, leisure and even transient business travel levels were strong. At the same time, new investments and targeted messaging focused on key international markets were bringing more travelers to the City. The effects could be seen across the five boroughs.
Even facing the retreat in January and February, the City hosted more than 56.7 million visitors who traveled 50 miles or more or stayed at least one night. By March, picking up with spring holiday travel and leading into the summer, visitation from domestic markets reached 47.3 million and international markets hit 9.4 million. Comparing 2022 results to the pre-pandemic benchmark, however, international travel still lags, down 31% from 2019 levels. The quicker return of domestic visitors pulled up the overall market, now just 15% below record levels.
Strong day and overnight domestic travel supported the hotel demand and was a driver to museums, theater, concerts and tourist attractions, as well as a year-over-year increase in visitor spending on dining out and shopping.
Shifting our focus to the business and leisure segments, we see a similar split. Business travel, a key driver of hotel nights and event spending, climbed back to hit a 15% share of total trips. With 8.9 million business trips in 2022, visitation was almost 5 million below 2019 levels. The convention market, facing more tactical and financial obstacles, slowed this segment’s recovery pace. Smaller meetings and transient business travel were key to growth.
The pattern looked different for leisure travel as the pandemic risks and regulations eased in the second quarter of 2022. Long-haul trips and extended weekend stays helped bring the year-end total to 47.8 million visitors, almost 90% of the 2019 record levels.
Digging deeper into the international markets, the overall positive results benefited from a very successful advertising campaign in global markets during the first half of the year. Not only did it lift travel in the short-term, but the benefits of raising awareness played out through the year; 2022 saw the UK and Canada return to top positions among the international markets, attracting over 1.5 million visitors to NYC. There was notable strong performance from historically important European and Latin American markets filling out the list of top markets. France, Germany, Spain and Italy together were at 75% of benchmark 2019 levels. In the Americas, Brazil and Mexico led the market bringing almost 900,000 visits. Across the Pacific, Australia and India were top performers.
The correlation between New York City’s position as the largest and most popular gateway to the US and our top international markets is highlighted in the table of scheduled flights as of March 2023. The strength of our air capacity is one of our greatest assets. With more than 2,835 international flights a week into the region’s three airports, the conditions are strong to foster continued inbound growth.
As always, our tourism and promotional campaigns play a significant role by encouraging locals and travelers to discover iconic sights and events across the five boroughs. Our team’s creative and strategic efforts have helped the City’s vibrant culture and unique experiences remain top of mind for anyone seeking to experience the best of NYC.
Our largest-ever multiphase marketing campaign, It’s Time for New York CitySM, has been a domestic and international success, putting NYC and our members front of mind for audiences around the world. With the affiliation of key travel partners in more than 15 markets, the 2021–2022 iteration drove more than 2.3 million trips and nearly $6 billion in visitor spending across the five boroughs. For the first iteration of the campaign, New York City Tourism + Conventions created a television campaign, which earned our team one of our two 2022 Emmy Awards.
Following that success, the campaign creative was refreshed for 2022–2023 (again featuring the City’s beacon of welcome, Lady Liberty) and launched domestically, with United Airlines and Amtrak as partners, and internationally in 18 markets. A symbolic sign of recovery, the campaign refresh coincided with Lady Liberty celebrating 136 years and the crown at the Statue of Liberty reopening to the public for the first time since its shutdown in 2020.
This new phase of the campaign continues to drive overnight visitation, increase travelers’ awareness of New York City and act as a reminder to audiences worldwide that there is no better time than the present to experience the City’s lively energy. We’ve established mutually beneficial partnerships through cobranded OOH and paid digital efforts, showcasing discounted fares and appealing packages from airlines, tour operators and other key travel partners. Our media has been spotted in every corner of the globe, showcasing our bright pink Lady Liberty creative on billboards, digital advertisements, bus shelters, baggage claims and more.
Our partners have taken a comprehensive and multifaceted approach to promoting all five boroughs, and their efforts have proven successful in attracting visitors to all areas of the City. They’ve curated customized newsletters, airport gate/lounge displays, travel magazines and in-flight literature, social media and more.
As of March 2023, we’ve garnered over 400 million impressions and 7 million clicks from our digital ad campaign, resulting in tens of thousands of confirmed trips to the City so far. We will conduct another SMARI media attribution study at the end of the campaign, but our partners’ interim booking reports have shown extremely promising results:
We look forward to the continued success of this campaign through its completion in June.
Our NYC Like a New Yorker campaign took geographical nouns, like “Queens,” and transformed them into verbs, speaking to the dynamism that is the core of the energy of the five boroughs. The aim was to encourage travelers to explore neighborhoods across the five boroughs—particularly those that may be lesser known.
While the It’s Time for New York City campaign invited out-of-town and international audiences to visit the destination, NYC Like a New Yorker spoke to those who were already here in the five boroughs. We developed a multichannel marketing and communications effort aimed at supporting small businesses around NYC and lifting BIPOC- and women-owned enterprises, so that all experienced the economic benefits of our industry.
Running from April to August 2022, the program featured one borough each month in a press release that showcased its essential neighborhood attractions and characteristics. This campaign was recognized by the U.S. Travel Association with the 2022 Destiny Award for “The Road Less Traveled” in August 2022.
In our NYC Local Legends video series, notable New Yorkers share their perspectives on some of the five boroughs’ most vibrant and culturally rich neighborhoods. These five-to-seven-minute documentary-style videos feature our “legends” introducing other key neighborhood figures who add color to what makes the neighborhood special, creating an immersive experience with each episode.
The series is part of our mission to offer more nuanced, personal perspectives on the City and highlight the wealth of NYC’s local businesses, particularly those that are women- and minority-owned, in order to encourage visitors to patronize them.
The video series is supported by a robust marketing plan that includes organic and paid social, our consumer newsletter, LinkNYC screens, native ads and more.
In our first episode, released in December, Michael “DJ Spynfo” Eagen—celebrated DJ and owner of Sankofa Haus—shows us around the neighborhood of Mott Haven. As the South Bronx native explores the area, he connects with friends, reflects on the neighborhood’s progression from the 1970s to present day, discusses the area being the birthplace of hip-hop and graffiti and visits some of the authentic offerings spearheaded by locals, including Beatstro, Chocobar Cortés, Bronx Native and Rosa’s at Park. The video has garnered 1.5 million views to date with over 30 million impressions across our channels.
In late January, we launched our second episode featuring We Run Uptown cofounder Hector Espinal Jr., who shows viewers around Washington Heights. Other episodes to be released in 2023 focus on neighborhoods in each of the other three boroughs: Jackson Heights, Queens; Stapleton, Staten Island; and Flatbush, Brooklyn. We will continue to explore other neighborhoods—and their history, culture and offerings—through the eyes of locals.
Launched in July of 2022 as part of the celebrations around the 30th anniversary of NYC Restaurant Week® and running through June of 2023, Savor NYCSM is an ongoing content platform that places a focus on the City’s incredible dining scene to firmly reinforce NYC’s reputation as the dining capital of the world. This content provides an all-encompassing resource for locals and visitors, complete with monthly themes that highlight distinct cuisines, multicultural neighborhoods, seasonal dining and culinary offers. In addition, Savor NYC showcases major citywide events and holidays through a culinary lens.
In August, we featured a preview of fall restaurant openings and a wrap-up of outdoor dining. For September, we put a spotlight on sustainable dining and gathered a roundup of eco-conscious eateries focused on minimizing their impact on the planet. In October, we focused on Latino-owned eateries in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month and, separately, collaborated with a charming Instagram creator named Skelly, a 3.5-inch-tall skeleton who starred in a series of animated GIFs with NYC-made Halloween-themed treats. For November, we focused on dining options near holiday attractions; in December, we highlighted foods that only NYC “does right”—pizza, bagels and chopped cheese among them. More recent features included a Chinatown dining guide timed to coincide with Lunar New Year in January; a roundup of Black-owned restaurants for Black History Month; and a focus on women chefs for Women’s History Month.
The initiative includes culinary-themed press outreach, cross-promotion of our dining content on LinkNYC screens and through our social and email channels, and the creation of social-first dining content including a partnership with local creators Righteous Eats. (For more on the collaboration, see the Social section.)
To date, Savor NYC has resulted in over 137,000 unique page views, with some of the most popular dining content being NYC Dining 101, our overview of the City’s restaurant scene.
Our hallmark shoulder-season initiatives continue to prove their value to members and visitors. We kicked off the fiscal year with the 30th anniversary of NYC Restaurant Week and recently concluded the fourth iteration of NYC Winter OutingSM, which groups together the City’s best deals. This May, we’ll also be launching a reenvisioned It’s Time for CultureSM program—New York City Tourism + Conventions’ newest addition to its vibrancy program portfolio.
We are grateful to Commissioner Anne del Castillo and the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment for their continued financial support of NYC Restaurant Week, NYC Broadway WeekSM and NYC Off-Broadway WeekSM.
NYC Restaurant Week celebrated its 30th anniversary in the summer of 2022, offering prix-fixe menus at $30, $45 and $60 for lunch or dinner. More than 650 restaurants across the five boroughs took part in the program, including 15 of the original participants from 1992. As always, the program encouraged locals and visitors to explore the City’s vast, diverse and accessible restaurant scene while helping to support small businesses, the industry and its workers.
We executed several initiatives to commemorate the program’s third decade, including a press conference at Gage & Tollner—one of the oldest restaurants in New York City and an original 1992 Restaurant Week participant—which featured an appearance by Mayor Eric Adams. On August 3, our CMO, Nancy Mammana, rang the opening bell at Nasdaq MarketSite to commemorate the occasion. She was joined by our staff; the Co-Chairs of our Culinary Committee, David Burke and Tren’ness Woods-Black; and our NYC Restaurant Week marketing partners. It was an exciting day and a boost that generated even more exposure during the middle of the five-week program.
For the first time ever, New York City Tourism + Conventions and Mastercard® partnered with Citizens Bank to further support the program. Additional partners of NYC Restaurant Week included Stella Artois, Wine Spectator, James Beard Foundation, OpenTable, the NYC Wine & Food Festival, Amtrak and Cobble.
As our preferred payment partner, Mastercard provided a statement credit to registered cardholders, enabling them to receive $10 cash back on bills of $45 or more when dining at participating restaurants during the first two weeks of the program. They reported $893,288 from NYC Restaurant Week transactions, which translated into nearly $70,000 in statement credit rebates for the consumers.
In total, the summer program drove 1.37 million landing page visits (32% higher than in summer 2021) and delivered 155 million impressions on our out-of-home ads, valued at $857,280, and 57 million impressions for our digital paid media resulting in 33,000 total estimated reservations.
The fall iteration of NYC Broadway Week returned for the first time since 2019 between September 6–25, 2022, once again offering 2-for-1 tickets to 22 of Broadway’s vibrant productions. The season’s lineup included newer shows like Funny Girl, Into the Woods, The Kite Runner, The Piano Lesson and Six.
In partnership with The Broadway League and Mastercard, NYC Broadway Week was promoted on Mastercard’s Priceless.com platform, out-of-home media across the five boroughs and commercials running in NYC taxicabs. It was also promoted through New York City Tourism + Conventions social media channels using both original and user-generated content, pegged to the hashtag #NYCBroadwayWeek. Additional marketing partners of NYC Broadway Week included Citizens Bank, Ticketmaster and Telecharge.
New York City Tourism + Conventions’ marketing efforts drove 689,000 landing page visits and 360,000 “buy now” visits (a 52% conversion rate) for NYC Broadway Week. We delivered 48.5 million impressions on our out-of-home ads, valued at $561,142, and over 5.7 million impressions for our digital paid media. Total sales for the program were $9,296,644 (124,013 tickets).
NYC Winter Outing, our umbrella campaign for our signature vibrancy programs (NYC Restaurant Week, NYC Broadway Week, NYC Must-See WeekSM and NYC Hotel WeekSM), invited visitors and locals to explore the best of the five boroughs by positioning the winter as a prime time to take advantage of the City’s best deals. This year’s edition began January 17 and ran through February 12. The savings encompassed discounted hotel rooms, prix-fixe menus and 2-for-1 ticket offers for Broadway shows, museums, attractions, performing arts and tours across all five boroughs. Each of our individual NYC Winter Outing programs, as well as the umbrella campaign, were promoted via SEM, a strategic programmatic digital campaign, printed and digital bus shelters, LinkNYC screens, commercials running in NYC taxicabs, press efforts and on our own website, as well as in our social and email channels. NYC Restaurant Week was also promoted with a two-page spread in The New York Times.
This year, we expanded our marketing partners exponentially to support our NYC Winter Outing program. Mastercard, as in previous years, was our preferred payment partner for the program, bringing in Citizens Bank once again as a key issuer. United Airlines joined us as an official partner; combined with Amtrak, NJ TRANSIT and MTA, we provided a robust variety of transportation options into New York City to facilitate travel for visitors who want to enjoy everything the programs have to offer.
Most metrics for NYC Winter Outing 2023 surpassed 2022 and even 2019 benchmarks. NYC Broadway Week 2023 was our second highest grossing program with over $12 million in ticket sales. Website traffic to the individual program pages surpassed previous years, and over 700 organizations participated in NYC Winter Outing 2023 overall, including Broadway shows, museums, restaurants and attractions.
Over 520 restaurants participated in the winter edition of this program, representing 86 neighborhoods and 48 cuisines. Mastercard once again provided a statement credit to registered cardholders, enabling them to receive $10 cash back on bills of $45 or more when dining on prix-fixe meals at a $30, $45 or $60 price point. Mastercard reported $980,365 in card spend from NYC Restaurant Week transactions, which translates into $95,000 in statement credit rebates for consumers. In total, the winter program drove 1.1 million landing page visits (19% higher than in winter 2022) and delivered 122 million impressions on our out-of-home ads, valued at $622,368, and 24 million impressions for our digital paid media resulting in 35,900 total estimated reservations.
NYC Broadway Week 2023 was our second-highest grossing iteration of this program with 154,364 tickets sold for $12,373,968 for 22 participating shows. This represented 14% of Broadway’s total revenue during these four weeks. Nearly a third of tickets were sold to visitors coming from at least 50 miles away. In total, the winter program drove 1.06 million landing page visits (21% higher than in winter 2022) and delivered 56 million impressions on our out-of-home ads, valued at $574,395, and 10.2 million impressions for our digital paid media.
This program supported the breadth of attractions, museums, tours and performing arts that can be found only in NYC. NYC Must-See Week had 50 participants in winter 2023, including many of the City’s icons and cultural institutions as well as tours and experiences throughout all five boroughs. The 2-for-1 ticket offer drove 327,000 landing page visits (48.5% higher than in winter 2022) and delivered 52.6 million impressions on our out-of-home ads, valued at $556,296, and 4.4 million impressions for our digital paid media.
Over 150 hotels offered a 23% discount on rooms for stays between January 3 and February 12, 2023. Reservations opened on November 15, 2022, which was two months prior to the public booking dates for the other programs. This early booking period was designed to give travelers who needed to plan ahead plenty of time to take advantage of the NYC Winter Outing offers. In total, the program drove 225,000 landing page visits (66% higher than in winter 2022) and delivered 101 million impressions on our out-of-home ads, valued at $1,030,082, and 12 million impressions for our digital paid media.
The fall iteration of this program invited New Yorkers and visitors to experience Off-Broadway theater with 2-for-1 tickets to 30 participating shows. The fall program sold 4,706 tickets for $196,000 (data includes 18 shows). It ran from September 26 through October 9, 2022, driving 140,000 landing page visits (21% higher than in fall 2019) and delivered over 40 million impressions on our out-of-home ads, valued at $398,445, and 4.8 million impressions for our digital paid media.
Immediately following NYC Winter Outing, the winter 2023 edition of NYC Off-Broadway Week launched with 26 participating shows. Both programs were generously supported by Mastercard and The Off-Broadway League. Media included a programmatic digital campaign, SEM, paid e-blasts, printed and digital bus shelters, LinkNYC screens, press efforts and NYCgo social and email channels.
During the winter, the 2-for-1 ticket offer drove 137,000 landing page visits (41% higher than in winter 2022) and delivered over 48 million impressions on our out-of-home ads, valued at $445,000, and 5 million impressions for our digital paid media.
With a city of over 8 million people from all walks of life, a collaborative approach that embraces different perspectives and backgrounds is crucial for creating an inclusive, welcoming destination. This past year, we recommitted to fostering and uplifting this approach through content, a variety of partnership initiatives and the support of our valued partners.
The breadth and depth of culture and diversity found in New York City is unmatched anywhere else in the world. We are committed to providing a platform for the communities that contribute to them. In 2022, we created meaningful—and award-winning—content to celebrate the history and experiences of NYC’s multicultural communities.
Mastercard and Crescent Rating’s 2022 Global Muslim Travel Index projects that there will be 140 million Muslim travelers in 2023, and this segment will reach 160 million by 2024—an important sector for the City. In February 2022, we released The Halal Travel Guide in an effort to promote New York City as a Muslim-friendly destination and to welcome Muslim travelers. Later in the year, we released an Arabic-language version of the guide. We are the first US tourism organization to create a dedicated resource for Muslim travelers, winning the Halal Travel Marketing Campaign of the Year at the Halal in Travel Awards by Crescent Rating.
Our “Freedom to Be” film featuring the Rockaways’ Black surfing community in Queens won an Emmy Award, while the whole series was named a Webby Honoree in the Video–Documentary category. The Black Experience content hub was promoted in a branded content partnership with Group Black/Essence.com with banner ads, video ads, custom branded articles, newsletters, social media and influencer extensions across Instagram and TikTok. The campaign overdelivered, garnering 36 million impressions digitally and 33 million impressions via influencers.
In February 2023, we launched a photo-and-interview-based feature on our website, “Rising Stars of the Black Community,” timed to coincide with Black History Month. The series featured an inspiring cast of local creators who speak to the opportunities for and diversity within NYC’s Black community. Supported by paid media, earned media and our owned channels—email, social and website—the interviews have received 9,000 impressions to date.
We also partnered with Black Gotham Experience and New York City’s Public Design Commission on “Epicenter,” a film that covers the history of NYC’s three City Halls through the lens of Black New Yorkers. The film, which highlights these too-often untold narratives, launched at City Hall in early February. It was supported via organic promotion over our owned channels and LinkNYC media, as well as through publicity efforts, including an organized tour for Travel + Leisure Editor in Chief Jacqui Gifford.
The Latino Experience in NYC was named a Webby Honoree in Websites and Mobile Sites–Diversity & Inclusion. Newer published pieces include stories that highlight the vibrancy of Latino culture in the Bronx including a business roundup spotlighting over 20 Latino-owned businesses in the area and a profile on Puerto Rican musician Miguel Angel “Mike” Amadeo, owner of Bronx icon Casa Amadeo—the oldest continuously run music store in New York City.
We launched a new platform video for The Asian Experience in NYC in time for AAPI Heritage Month in May, spotlighting the diversity within the Asian community and its many contributions to the City. In addition to neighborhood and cultural guides, other content includes a “Guide to Asian-Owned Bookstores” and features like “What We’ve Built: Leaders in the AAPI Community,” which focuses on four Asian American New Yorkers, the stories behind their businesses and the sense of community that they foster within their areas and throughout NYC.
The Latino Experience and The Asian Experience content hubs were promoted via Meta ads, Google search, programmatic and more to potential first-time and repeat visitors to NYC, along with people considering a city vacation and Latino and Asian communities with an interest in exploring their culture through travel. The campaign ran from June 30 to October 31, 2022, and garnered over 45 million impressions, 283,000 link clicks and 1.5 million video views.
Aside from these multicultural platforms, we continue to uplift diverse voices throughout our content, such as our feature on Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Randall’s Island, spotlight on women-run restaurants and more.
With an ongoing goal of ensuring that NYC is the world's most welcoming and inclusive destination, our internal DEI Advisory Board and member-facing IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility) Committee have held a series of cultural webinars and trainings for our staff and our members. These included a Latin American Heritage Webinar, a Native American Heritage Webinar, a hip-hop themed Black History Month webinar, gender bias training with The Band of Sisters, gender expansive training with GET Phluid and more. These cultural webinars and trainings around diverse communities will continue, as well as the introduction of additional in-person offerings—including panels and cultural celebrations.
The DEI Advisory Board also developed a land acknowledgement statement with representatives from the Lenape Center to recognize our residence on the homeland of the Lenape people and our commitment to uplifting Indigenous stories and history more in the future.
Accessibility is critical to our efforts to promote the City. In the lead-up to our website relaunch, we are partnering with longtime consultants Peter Slatin of The Slatin Group and Lakshmee Lachhman-Persad of Accessible Travel NYC (and a member of our board of directors) to create and update content to inspire visitors and help them navigate the City once they arrive. In addition, we are working with Level Access, a digital accessibility consultant service, to ensure our digital channels meet or exceed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Accessibility is one of our forthcoming new website’s fundamentals, and we will continue to update, iterate and innovate with this audience firmly in mind.
We also partnered with Mr. Slatin and Ms. Lachhman-Persad to deliver a series of four trainings on accessibility for our staff. The invigorating sessions focused on defining disability and accessibility, and internal and external relations with respect to accessibility. As with our other verticals, our ongoing accessibility content work continues, including a guide to Disability Pride events in NYC and “Accessible NYC Dining,” a guide to restaurants in NYC for those with disabilities. We also updated our “Guide to NYC Observatories,” as well as the accessibility filter for summer NYC Restaurant Week.
Our members heard from our partners as we hosted a virtual New York City Tourism + Conventions Talks entitled “ADA at 32. Learn. Share. Hire!” Given the steady recovery of tourism and the challenge of recruiting and retaining staff for hospitality businesses, we brought together experts in disability employment who discussed the benefits of hiring workers with disabilities.
To continue supporting NYC as the world’s number one LGBTQ+ destination, our Tourism Development team collaborated with Heritage of Pride and Pride organizations across the five boroughs. We expanded efforts as a global partner with the International LGBTQ+ Travel Association (IGLTA) by joining their Featured Destination program, which provides heightened recognition and visibility among LGBTQ+ travelers and year-round access to enhanced marketing and communication opportunities throughout the association’s worldwide network.
The team reached over 1,100 members of the trade through the US-Mexico Travel & Tourism Forum and the Visit USA Brazil LGBTQ Panel + Marketplace and welcomed back PROUD Experiences to New York City (a Reed Exhibitions showcase for luxury travel). During PROUD Experiences, our Press team held a briefing for LGBTQ+ media during the trade show.
As for our marketing efforts, NYC Pride 2022 (the first in-person edition of the event since the pandemic began) served as a tentpole moment to drive overnight visitation and reengage with our LGBTQ+ audience. Featuring the line “It’s Time for NYC Pride,” the campaign was promoted throughout June on static and digital bus shelters, LinkNYC screens and at a viewing event we hosted during the NYC Pride March for media, partners and the travel trade.
We also launched a robust paid digital campaign that incorporated Meta, paid search and both site direct and programmatic buys through Rivendell Media, Q.Digital and Pride Media, reaching LGBTQ Nation, Queerty and GayCities. Amtrak also promoted the campaign at amtrak.com/nyc and on their Instagram Stories as part of our larger partnership in the Northeast. The campaign generated 24 million impressions, 181,000 link clicks and 2.6 million video views. LGBTQ+ content was also created for Pride 2022 and throughout the year. Pieces published on our website included “How to Celebrate NYC Pride 2022,” a five-borough guide to LGBTQ+ celebrations in the City; “Pride Arts and Culture Events”; and a profile of Ginger’s, a lesbian bar, safe space and community hangout in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
LGBTQ+ audiences in the US, Mexico, Canada and the UK are targeted year-round as part of our borough content amplification program, where we leverage programmatic native display to reach consumers during moments of intent while they engage with contextually relevant content across the web. This media drives awareness and generates interest in diverse experiences around the five boroughs.
Efforts to support the LGBTQ+ travel segment around the world continued in 2023. We participated in an LGBTQ+ panel at Professional Convention Management Association Convening Leaders in January. The Tourism team followed World PRIDE celebrations in Sydney with a sales mission to New Zealand and Australia, where we hosted a client event with LGBTQ+ travel buyers. In February 2023, the team was in India for IGLTA’s first-ever travel symposium in the country.
Our partnerships have allowed us to expand the reach of our content and provide incremental support to our member businesses in promotion of the five boroughs.
Our partnership with Mastercard continues to support our efforts to attract visitors who seek deeper exploration of the City. They are the preferred payment partner of all our signature marketing programs: NYC Winter Outing, NYC Restaurant Week, NYC Broadway Week, NYC Off-Broadway Week, NYC Must-See Week and NYC Hotel Week. Their presales, supporting early access to these programs and statement credit for NYC Restaurant Week, provide valuable support during key need periods.
In 2022, we partnered with organizations such as Carib Biz Network, the Asian American International Film Festival and Green Book Global to highlight our multicultural articles and videos and increase our website traffic within the Latino, Asian and Black communities. We also promoted our Halal Travel Guide through a collaboration with The Halal Guys restaurant franchise and the play The Kite Runner.
In the fall, we partnered with Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote their weeklong return to Brooklyn. The first airing on September 26, 2022, was the show’s most viewed telecast in Brooklyn since 2018. It reached over 1.6 million viewers and featured notable New Yorkers such as Tracy Morgan, Ben Stiller and Amy Schumer. The partnership leveraged our out-of-home media assets in exchange for placement of our It’s Time for New York City creative in an on-air bumper on the September 27 broadcast.
Another meaningful partnership was with Little Amal Walks, a 12-foot-tall puppet representing a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, which walked throughout the five boroughs and participated in over 55 events put on by various NYC arts and culture organizations, showcasing our city's spirit of welcome and hope.
We continue to collaborate with annual tentpole events like the Chelsea Film Festival, New York Comedy Festival, New York City Wine & Food Festival, The Armory Show, PaleyWKND and the US Open to showcase our city’s offerings to passionate audiences interested in music, art and culture.
Honoring our ongoing commitment to sustainability, we partnered with Climate Week NYC—the biggest global climate event of its kind—and The Nest Summit to bring together influential leaders in climate action from business, government and the climate community as they returned to an in-person program in September 2022 at the Javits Center. We produced a main stage event at The Nest with the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) addressing the role tourism can play in supporting biodiversity.
Many of our members joined us in commemorating the start of Climate Week NYC with building lightings that turned the NYC skyline green. We amplified appearances made by Frankie the Dinosaur, the UN’s climate change mascot, during Climate Week NYC events as he promoted his “Don’t Choose Extinction” campaign. The week concluded with us joining the Climate Week NYC team at the ringing of the Nasdaq closing bell.
We also partnered with Global Citizen Festival for its 10th anniversary, advocating for critical issues such as climate change, poverty and inequality.
We are proud to serve on the U.S. Travel Association Sustainable Travel Coalition to inform US travel on sustainability issues in NYC and develop best practices to achieve a more sustainable future for the tourism industry.
Our diverse inbound market mix has always set New York City apart from other destinations, and we were proud to fully reestablish our pre-pandemic global reach over the course of the last year. Following the February 2023 appointment of our newest agency in China, we once again have 17 expert teams representing New York City across travel trade, public relations, marketing and MICE, in 28 countries on five continents.
As part of our “always on” media relations efforts, our Communications team engages journalists at home and around the world to proactively shape messaging about New York City and manage reactive and crisis communications efforts. Throughout 2022, we welcomed hundreds of media from across the country and around the world back to NYC, connecting them and their readers with all that NYC has to offer, from iconic sites, attractions and new openings to local neighborhood experiences and small businesses found only in the five boroughs.
Over the past year, we reached media in target markets through nearly 30 in-market press conferences, missions and media marketplace events globally, as well as here on the ground in NYC. We also supported more than 350 media visits, including 10 group familiarization trips, inviting travel writers and influencers to experience the vibrancy, diversity and dynamism of NYC in person.
We globally distributed 50 press releases to the media and participated in more than 100 media deskside meetings, shaping stories with information on new and seasonal activities and events, including “What’s New in New York City” quarterly fact sheets, highlighting our members across the five boroughs. In addition, we distributed more than 30 Tourism Update newsletters to members biweekly.
On the domestic front, the team continued to engage with regional and drive-market media to tell positive destination stories through local broadcast affiliates, newspapers and digital media, while also securing features in top domestic travel magazines and coverage in key markets including Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and others. Major communications initiatives included the Get Local NYC campaign, which featured dedicated five-borough guides and CBS Radio segments as well as a preview of the 2023 NYC Winter Outing vibrancy campaign in the fall to maximize exposure and opportunity to drive bookings.
We continued our efforts to increase our engagement with US-based Spanish-speaking media outlets through dedicated outreach, highlighting our initiatives and Latino communities and businesses across the five boroughs.
Working to generate positive news about the five boroughs globally is market-specific work and crucial to promoting inbound travel to New York City—considering that international visitors account for 20% of NYC visitation but almost 50% of all spending and hotel room nights sold.
As international travel widely resumed this year, we reestablished NYC as a must-visit destination and told the world that we are back in a big, big way. Our team and in-market PR representatives hit the road, engaging travel editors and writers, and generating press coverage in key markets across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Oceania through “What’s New in NYC” press conferences, trade shows, deskside meetings and media marketplaces.
This ongoing surge of vital coverage placed a spotlight on our membership and signature programs, communications campaigns and local initiatives—including the It’s Time for New York City and It’s Time to Make It NYCSM campaigns. We placed approximately 17,000 positive news stories.
This strategic storytelling and messaging reinforces tourism as a major economic driver for the five boroughs and its role in the City’s continued recovery.
We are proud to note that New York City was named 2023’s Number One Popular Destination in the United States. Tripadvisor’s Travelers’ Choice Best of the Best Awards celebrate tourists’ favorite destinations and places to go in different categories. Results are calculated from data gathered from user ratings and reviews on tripadvisor.com.
NYC has also been named the Best Trending Domestic City – United States on Kayak’s Travel Awards. These awards showcase the most popular and top-rated hotels, destinations, airlines and rental cars. This recognition is based on real traveler searches from January to October of 2022, where New York City has proudly secured the number one spot on the list.
These honors are a credit to our teams’ hard work in promoting our destination and in welcoming travelers with interests in all sectors of our tourism economy.
New York City has landed at number six on a new index from the World Travel & Tourism Council. The index ranks the world’s most powerful tourism destinations by visitor spending based on 2022 tourism data.
In 2022, the Tourism Development team continued to rebuild and strengthen leisure travel to NYC. By reestablishing our international representation to pre-Covid levels, we were able to focus on rebuilding trade relationships, relaunching NYC’s presence at major trade shows and sales missions, and aligning recovery campaigns with trade partners.
The team attended 29 trade shows and industry events in 2022. We conducted 10 sales missions and hosted nine familiarization trips with leisure travel partners. The strength of our destination product is unparalleled, and it is heartening to see passionate interest in promoting and booking NYC among members of the travel trade.
The team showcased New York City as the premier leisure destination for discerning travelers around the world at the International Luxury Travel Market (ILTM) Latin America and Cannes, as well as during our Middle East Sales Mission and Virtuoso Travel Week. Our partnerships with top luxury travel networks such as Serandipians, Virtuoso and Signature Travel Network provide further opportunities to promote our city to their clientele.
Domestic group business continued its rebound, and we promoted NYC at the American Bus Association (ABA), Travel Professionals of Color, the National Tour Association (NTA), the African American Travel Conference and the Student/Youth Travel Association (SYTA) Annual Conference ahead of hosting the latter event in 2024, giving New York City the amazing opportunity again to showcase the City to this market.
We celebrated the return of our NYC Center Stage luncheon at IPW in June, where we partnered with Broadway Inbound to feature performances from six Broadway shows and highlight our content hub, The Black Experience in NYC. IPW is the largest leisure travel show in the USA, creating the best opportunity to reach global trade buyers and media in one place. Last year, the show took place in Orlando and was attended by nearly 4,800 attendees from over 60 countries. We conducted a total of 210 trade appointments over the course of three days.
With the team attending seven trade shows and conducting five sales missions in major markets in Q1 to date, 2023 is off to a strong start. In late January, we hosted a US/Canada Reverse Sales Mission, creating an opportunity for members to meet domestic and Canadian travel trade in our own backyard. We hosted 15 buyers from the US and 15 from Canada with 30 members attending the sales mission. To expand the type of product shared with our trade partners, we held a Five-Borough Marketplace at the start of the mission, featuring 28 smaller member businesses who exemplify the diversity of product throughout the City.
The team also launched a scholarship program to create opportunities for small businesses and cultural organizations to participate in sales missions with us and showcase the diverse neighborhood experiences of NYC to global trade buyers. To date, participation costs have been waived for nine small businesses and cultural organizations to participate in sales missions in 2023.
The Convention Development team continued to source leads to drive group bookings, build and support relationships and forge direct connections for members with key business event planners. Our sales activities returned to pre-pandemic levels, with the team attending 84 total events and trade shows in 2022, ultimately generating 2,646 qualified group leads for members. The team confirmed 1,130 new group bookings last year totaling 269,063 room nights; this is 82% of our total 2019 volume. In terms of lost business, there were an additional 1,433 group leads that were lost to other destinations, representing roughly 1,243,200 room nights. The primary reason for lost business was required space or dates were not available.
We were pleased to help host Marriott International’s annual association and corporate customer conference, The Exchange—hosted for the first time in New York City. This July event showcased a rejuvenated Times Square to over a thousand of the hotel brand’s top customers and association and corporate event planners, who all plan several events each year. Events like The Exchange help increase tourism in the City, bringing hundreds of future programs to NYC with millions of delegates.
The 2023 Global Conference for the Society for Incentive Travel Excellence (SITE) took place in New York City February 17–20. This edition also marked the association’s 50th anniversary, celebrating five decades of incentive travel. Hosting this important conference in the City encourages new business throughout the five boroughs—specifically for the sales incentive market.
Supporting our partners and members with their client events and participating at trade shows like IMEX America, PCMA Convening Leaders, MPI World Education Congress, SITE Global Conference and annual conferences for the National Coalition of Black Meeting Professionals, LGBTQ Meeting Professionals Association and Financial & Insurance Conference Professionals ensures NYC stays top of mind for planners from every market vertical, with the corporate group segment remaining strong and associations increasingly sourcing for 2024 and beyond.
We’ve boosted the team’s efforts by continuing our It’s Time to Make It NYCSM marketing campaign, engaging planners in their sourcing cycle and drawing awareness to the City as the best destination for business events. The 2022 campaign saw over 10 million impressions on a mix of ads in Google, Meta and LinkedIn as well as sponsored emails and our own Meeting Planner Newsletter (with an average of 28% open rate). We also geotargeted ads to reach planners who were attending large conventions like IMEX to drive booth traffic and complemented this targeting with site-direct ads on industry websites like Northstar, Meeting Planners International, Cvent, SITE, PCMA and IMEX.
We continue to position New York City as a global stage to host major events, like our ongoing bids to host the Democratic National Convention in 2024 and the FIFA World Cup in 2026 with New Jersey. As business ramps back up, our team is poised to take advantage of the opportunities in the marketplace and direct more of these critical big events and conventions to NYC.
Our Destination Services team works with meeting planners and event organizers to help them put on a successful convention or event in New York City. They offer both turnkey and customized resources such as travel information, photos and videos, editorial content and attendance-building tools to help promote the City as the meeting destination, and to encourage attendees and exhibitors to explore NYC while they are in town on business. The Destination Services department also sources direct business leads and referrals to our members for everything from private dining to reception venues, transportation, temp staffing and other business services.
Destination Services works closely with the Convention Development team and has directly supported over 120+ confirmed conventions, trade shows, meetings and big events, including over 40 that come to the City on an annual basis, as well as numerous high-profile bids for new business.
Notable new events were the International Gynecologic Cancer Society meeting, The Marriott Exchange and the American Immigration Lawyers Association conference. Returning events included National Retail Federation (NRF), the Auto Show and Fleet Week. Additionally, NYC continues to prove a major draw for attendees, showed by attendance records broken in both B2B and B2C events. SITE Global Conference broke their attendance records with nearly 800 delegates at the New York Marriott Marquis, and Anime NYC with 55,000 attendees at Javits Center.
As business travel in New York City continues to rebound, the Destination Services team is working hard to help shows grow their attendance and ensure NYC is positioned as a desirable, exciting and navigable meeting destination.
Our B2B and B2C website is the official digital guide for travelers and locals looking to explore the five boroughs.
As we have now become New York City Tourism + Conventions, it is imperative we continue to reinforce our mission for visitors, residents and businesses through the B2C and B2B websites. We are revamping our sites to create more direct paths to the content consumers are seeking, and a more streamlined user experience overall, helping us to remain the official go-to NYC digital guide.
Within our current B2C site, website optimizations are ongoing as we work with our digital partners to establish our new brand identity and messaging while measuring the success of our marketing tactics on different platforms. We are leveraging new partners within programmatic channels, such as Sojern, a leading travel marketing partner utilizing machine learning technology, and Bidtellect, a cookie-less ad delivery platform. These partners are helping us drive awareness and conversions for our tourism, vibrancy and evergreen campaigns on a larger scale than prior years. We have also introduced the use of QR codes to stimulate traffic and engagement to our site via out-of-home media promoting NYC.
Continual analysis of our marketing strategies has led to significant growth in traffic with visits up 38% year over year, with our top driving channel being natural search—proving our incredibly strong positioning within keyword rankings. Comparing visits from Q1 of 2023 and 2022, we are pacing well ahead of last year, with visits up 22%.
Within the B2B site, providing support and valuable tools to our members, the travel trade, meeting planners and the press is an integral part of our mission statement. Our renewed B2B media strategy involves testing programmatic channels, streamlining our email tactics and continuing our use of social networks like LinkedIn to advance B2B goals. The site is also a repository for public-facing and member-only tourism marketing data and insights from our Research team.
We are focusing on optimizing our targeted messaging efforts and strengthening our first-party data in preparation for the deprecation of cookies. In 2022, we engaged with subscribers by sharing our inspirational content and driving sales for our core marketing programs.
Our 2022 email marketing program had three primary objectives: improving subscriber retention, strengthening our segmentation strategy and increasing email performance. Throughout the year, we engaged with 512,000 subscribers, a 9% YoY increase from 2021. Additionally, 43.3 million emails were sent, a 35% increase from the previous year. To avoid overwhelming our subscriber base and ultimately reduce churn, the number of email campaigns sent this year stayed consistent with 2021.
The email marketing program has placed an importance on creating individualized experiences for our subscribers. To achieve this goal, we began segmenting our audience by both geographic location and actions taken on our website. Furthermore, we have enhanced our consumer newsletters to provide meaningful, relevant content in an effort to boost subscriber engagement within our emails.
Along with the Tourism Updates our Communications team managed, our other B2B emails shared the goal to keep our membership, meeting planner and travel trade audiences informed on NYC news and updates. As with our consumer emails, on average, our business-to-business email lists grew in 2022. We took steps to modify the cadence of our B2B emails by reducing the frequency of emails deployed each month. This was intended to avoid fatigue and to create a sense of consistency and balance with our communications, keeping NYC fresh in the minds of our subscribers.
The Social Media team’s initiatives are a core part of our messaging strategy. Through our presence on an array of channels, the team supports both critical company-wide programs and our ongoing inspirational content launches while expanding our reach and relevance with a variety of social-only tactics. We remain focused on celebrating New York City’s diversity—not only in terms of our neighbors and neighborhoods but also in the never-ending variety of things to do in the five boroughs.
The team has continued recruiting talented New Yorkers for our Digital Creator Squad, a collective of NYC-based Instagram, TikTok and YouTube creatives from around the City with a combined audience of 1.7 million followers. Current members have focused on food and dining, events, hotels, museums and attractions, developing authentic content for our channels.
Our Creator Squad has created an online presence exceeding programmatic benchmarks. Specifically, the engagement rate (comments, likes, shares, saves) for our Creator Squad posts is 5.6% on average—our non-Creator Squad posts run typically at 3.3% and industry benchmarks range from 1–5%. They are the voice of NYC, using the power of storytelling to inspire locals and tourists alike to travel to and within the five boroughs and to share the message of NYC as the greatest city in the world.
#SavorNYC
To support the City’s long-standing businesses and celebrate the best of the boroughs, we created a social series around classic NYC restaurants. The series kicked off in October, aka National Pizza Month. A visit to Luigi’s Pizza in Park Slope, which captured YouTube-famous Brooklyn pizzamaker Gio Lanzo at work, generated 129,000 plays and 5,900 engagements on Instagram.
Our partnership with Righteous Eats exceeded channel benchmarks by 37%. Among our most recent collaborations was a feature on 97-year-old Holocaust survivor and S&S Cheesecake founder Fred Schuster in the Bronx—which went viral with 495,000 video plays on Instagram and is now our most-popular Righteous Eats collaboration to date.
#NYCMuseums
Augmenting our efforts to promote the City’s cultural sector, we added museums to our regular Instagram Reels/TikTok rotation. A video tour of the Louis Armstrong House Museum became our first piece of viral content on TikTok (115,000 views and counting—our most popular TikTok post to date), while our collaboration with content creator Norberto Briceño, who produced a fascinating Metropolitan Museum of Art architecture reel for us on Instagram, has racked up 650,000 views.
#CheckInNYC
As part of our mission to support NYC hotels, our team added video content to our lineup in both organic and paid-partnership form with the debut of #CheckInNYC. We worked with longtime NYC travel journalist and content creator Laura Peruchi to explore the Lower East Side via a stay at Hotel Indigo Lower East Side New York, followed by a sponsored-content package in November spotlighting four Hilton properties as excellent spots for winter stays. So far, this initiative has generated 235,000 video plays on Instagram.
The NYC Official Map has relaunched with 350,000 print copies and a digital presence on our website. The map was updated with detailed information provided by DOT and includes two new borough neighborhood inserts (Flatbush and Belmont) and 19 member advertisers.
The NYC Official Map is distributed to approximately 500 points across NYC and the tristate area, including major hotels, airports and transit hubs.
Our licensing program puts some of the City’s most iconic marks into the hands of consumers via major retail partnerships and high-profile design collaborations. In 2022, these relationships and the resulting products enabled us to grow the NYC brand around the globe. As tourists return to the City, our souvenir shop business is rebounding to pre-pandemic levels.
While continuously elevating different marks within the New York City portfolio, including those of the globally recognized FDNY and NYPD, we also support our own brands and company-wide initiatives through licensed products. We look forward to developing licensing opportunities for our new destination logo, “New York City.”
Our ability to capitalize on trends remains an asset as we partnered with Only NY and DSNY on merchandise that generated buzz across social media and news outlets. We continue to find new licensees and expand into new categories by partnering with small NYC-based businesses with large social media presences and unique retail placements.
Our Membership team continued to adapt to meet the evolving needs of businesses across the City. We worked with businesses of all sizes and categories, across all five boroughs to keep them active, engaged and on the road to recovery. We introduced members to new audiences around the globe, offered revenue-driving opportunities through our signature vibrancy programs, upgraded our research and reports, invited them to attend industry events and sales missions, and provided virtual and in-person networking and educational opportunities.
Member retention remains a key priority. We have 1,800 active members today and welcomed 68 new members in 2022. We are encouraged by a strong start to 2023, having welcomed 22 new members in Q1.
Member events are consistently in the top three of member benefits and have made a strong comeback as people become more comfortable meeting in person. While virtual formats remain productive for education and training, we’ve hosted a steady stream of in-person events, bringing back our popular Business Card Exchanges. These included:
Business Card Exchange: Bateaux Celestial
May 2022
Business Card Exchange: Hard Rock Cafe
September 2022
Business Card Exchange: Whitney Museum of American Art
December 2022
Business Card Exchange: City Winery New York
January 2023
Business Card Exchange: Brooklyn Winery
March 2023
Our signature “Talks” program featured industry updates, insights and education on key initiatives including Accessibility, Sustainability, Market Updates and more. Through virtual and in-person presentations and panel discussions, we gave members the opportunity to hear from and engage with industry experts and leading voices from around the world. We also brought back our Member Orientation & Refresher, NYC Tourism Cares and introduced a new program, Meet the Member, where businesses present to our full team.
Talks: Global Student Travel
January 2022
Members joined us in person at The Westin New York at Times Square for an industry update and panel discussion, presented by SYTA, on the global student industry, featuring market research, country updates on inbound and outbound travel, and tour operator and supplier perspectives on facilitating travel for 2022 and 2023.
Talks: What’s on Tap for 2022
February 2022
Members joined us virtually for an in-depth review of the New York City Travel Barometer, a comprehensive and centralized source for high-frequency intelligence on the New York City travel industry and the broader economy. Members were able to learn more about our sales activities for 2022 and opportunities to participate in trade shows and sales missions, including an update from U.S. Travel Association’s Malcolm Smith, Senior Vice President of Business Development and General Manager of IPW.
Talks: Your Membership in Action
March 2022
In preparation for our Annual Meeting on March 30, the membership team created a new educational program, Your Membership in Action, which covered how to make the most of partnering with our company. In an in-person breakout session, members learned about tactical membership benefits, resources and opportunities for partnership engagement to help build their businesses. A highlight of this session was the demonstration of a brand-new interactive feature of the monthly NYC Travel Barometer Dashboard.
NYC Tourism Cares: Morningside Park
May 2022
Members were invited to join us in Morningside Park for NYC Tourism Cares, a day for volunteer service and networking. NYC was the original host city for Tourism Cares in 2003; and today NYC Tourism Cares brings the spirit and helping hands of the tourism industry to communities in all five boroughs.
Talks: Summer Youth Employment Program
June 2022
To assist our members with staffing shortages and to support workforce development, we teamed up with the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development and invited members to join a webinar to take advantage of the Summer Youth Employment Program, which provides paid work experiences and career exploration for a record 100,000 youths.
Talks: ADA 32: Learn. Share. Hire!
July 2022
With the steady recovery of tourism and the challenge to recruit and retain staff for hospitality businesses, we connected our members to access the ever-ready community of adults with disabilities. Moderated by Lakshmee Lachhman-Persad, Founder of AccessibleTravelNYC.com, and Peter Slatin, Founder of The Slatin Group, we heard from Martha Jackson, Acting Commissioner NYC Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities; Susan Crystal-Mansour, Ph.D., Vice President of Program Impact, National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation; and Alan Momeyer, Chief Human Resources Officer Emeritus, Loews Corporation.
Member Orientation & Refresher
September 2022
More than 200 members joined us for a virtual presentation of our initiatives for members and the City. They learned about tactical membership benefits, resources and opportunities for partnership engagement to help build their businesses.
Talks: A Nature Positive Approach to Net-Zero Travel & Tourism
September 2022
Members joined us in person at The Nest Summit Campus, during Climate Week NYC at the Javits Center, for a panel discussion on how the travel industry can fulfill its potential as a key nature positive sector and thereby lead the way to achieve the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target. Julia Simpson, President & CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council, along with Fred Dixon, hosted a conversation with travel and tourism leaders on how the industry is doing its part.
Talks: Mastercard Digital Doors for Small Business
October 2022
Small businesses heard from Mastercard’s expert Ginger Siegel, North America Small Business Lead, who provided an overview on Mastercard Digital Doors program, a suite of tools and resources to help businesses expand their digital presence, keep their businesses safe and maximize sales.
Hotel Partner Meeting
October 2022
On October 24, we welcomed more than 200 hoteliers at the New York Hilton Midtown for the return of our annual Hotel Partner Meeting where we discussed the NYC market outlook and trends. Our team provided an update on campaigns, initiatives and member opportunities while expert guest speakers from Tourism Economics, STR and Amadeus broke down the latest visitation by segment and region and delivered forecasts and strategies for the future.
Talks: Market Update & Business Development Opportunities
November 2022
Leaders of our Convention, Tourism Development and Research teams hosted a virtual presentation of the latest NYC market outlook, upcoming trends and sales opportunities, including a deep dive into our 2023 Member Business Development Opportunities calendar of upcoming trade shows and sales missions.
Member Orientation & Refresher
February 2023
More than 250 members joined us for a virtual presentation of our initiatives for members and the City. They learned about tactical membership benefits, resources and opportunities for partnership engagement to help build their businesses.
Members of the travel trade, including travel sellers, bundlers and event planners, seek out unique and authentic NYC experiences to offer their clients. Our free Tourism Ready program gives local businesses a better understanding of the power of the travel trade, as well as tools for working with this valuable sector to secure advanced bookings and repeat business. The goal of Tourism Ready is twofold: to expand the number of businesses benefiting from the tourism economy and to grow and diversify our tourism product offerings across the five boroughs.
NYC is the first destination to create a program to educate local businesses about the tourism industry and provide instruction on how to both build tourism efforts through partnerships and collaborate with the travel trade. It is important to note that membership is not required to participate in the Tourism Ready program. The program is specifically designed to reach businesses that may not yet recognize the value of or understand how to work with the tourism industry.
We resumed the full Tourism Ready program in 2022, running our Tourism 101 sessions in a virtual format, and hosting borough-specific meetings in person in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. More than 180 businesses across the five boroughs were involved in the 2022 program.
The NYC & Company Foundation renewed its fundraising efforts in 2022 with the successful return of our Visionaries + Voices gala. The 2022 honorees included The New LaGuardia Airport, the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, Shelly Fireman and the Fireman Hospitality Group and Ellen Futter (President of the American Museum of Natural History). The evening, which included the Foundation’s first auction and appeal, raised more than $800,000—far exceeding all our recent fundraising efforts.
The funds will be distributed in part through the Borough Cultural Tourism Grant Program, which the Foundation launched in 1998. As we continue to emerge from the effects of the pandemic, these grants provide vital marketing and audience development funds to the City’s small cultural organizations, contributing directly to the diversity and dynamism of NYC. Since its inception, the grant program has provided nearly 200 organizations throughout the five boroughs with nearly $4 million in marketing, audience development and advertising funds to help the organizations reach new attendees.
As we continue to regain our visitation numbers of both leisure and business travelers and work to restore 2019 visitation levels in 2024, we will focus on dispersing the economic benefits of tourism throughout the five boroughs and encouraging longer, deeper engagement with our city.
We will represent New York City as the most vibrant and diverse destination in the world, and through the lens of our new branding and refreshed company mission will center this work around three main priorities:
Continue positioning New York City as the world’s most aspirational and welcoming travel destination, while positively influencing exploration of all five boroughs
Sustainably restore both visitation and visitor spending
Expand our funding and resources, thereby ensuring destination competitiveness as well as financial sustainability for the organization
Following our unveiling at the Annual Meeting, we will implement a new, cohesive destination branding system to help guide all decisions moving forward and assist with consistent brand stewardship around the world. This will include a robust style guide and tool kit, defining all usage requirements and best practices. The new branding, especially our bold new “New York City” mark, will be used in all B2C consumer communications and marketing, and will be the focus of our next tourism campaign this fall, helping to build global equity in this evergreen IP around the world. The full “New York City Tourism + Conventions” mark will primarily be used in B2B and corporate communications initiatives, particularly in the areas of Convention Sales and Membership.
All trade shows, merchandise, signage and collateral will be updated to reflect the new look and feel, inclusive of our updated mark, typography and a bespoke color palette inspired by the colors of NYC, such as Taxi Yellow, Ferry Orange, Liberty Green, Lox Pink, Rockaway Sand and Coffee Cup Blue. Also, for the first time, we will have a full suite of supporting animation artwork and an updated photographic style to reflect a more unified look and feel.
We will also evolve and expand the rebrand throughout the year and beyond through like-minded partnerships, particularly in the areas of content and licensed merchandise, with local New York City designers and creators—with future announcements to come.
The rebrand will vividly come to life with the launch of our new website, nyctourism.com, this spring. The website will be a complete expression of the rebrand, including the new color palette, photography style, icons and other graphic elements.
The new website will be a significant upgrade from the current system, which was last updated in 2016. Specifically, it will utilize new front- and back-end systems and will create more direct paths to the content our audiences care about most. It will also take a mobile-first approach in order to be an even more valuable planning tool, as 75% of our current site traffic comes from mobile.
The website is also being built with an “accessibility-first” approach, with special attention paid to all aspects of ADA compliance. We have hired a best-in-class agency, Level Access, to help guide and handle all optimizations and have contracted The Slatin Group for ongoing consulting. Accessibility is being built into the foundation of the site, ensuring all future content updates remain accessible and approachable for all.
Also, in preparation for the deprecation of third party cookies in 2024, we will lay the groundwork in 2023 to capture more first party data in order to better engage with prospective travelers. Beginning with the launch of the new site, we will implement a new personalization strategy to target those consumers both from a geographic and behavioral perspective, retargeting them with more content they could be interested in and nudging them toward content they might also consider, all in the name of generating more exploration and awareness of our neighborhoods and businesses throughout the five boroughs.
In tandem with this, we will continue the refinement and advancement of our email strategy. We have recently created dashboards in our Adobe systems that allow us to measure the impact that every email has on website metrics and bookings for all programs, building upon key learnings. For example, email traffic for NYC Winter Outing 2023 drove 4% of all bookings, which is the highest to date. We will also continue to focus on reducing the unsubscribe rate and increasing subscriber engagement through segment and creative analysis and strategic planning.
From a social media perspective, we will continue our focus on video, leaning heavily toward short-form content on most channels to drive traffic to our channels and engagement with our promotional programs. Longer form content like Local Legends will continue to be distributed on channels like YouTube and nyctourism.com, serving as brand-building and awareness vehicles for local small businesses and neighborhoods.
We will continue to deploy our ongoing rotation of influencers from outside the market across travel, lifestyle, food, culture, theater and retail, promoting our programs throughout the year to their audiences and channels, helping us to gain incremental reach and exposure. We’ll also continue to build our Creator Squad, a team of local NYC creators who develop content for our channels on an ongoing basis, helping to ensure we continue to provide a forum for authentic local voices and perspectives.
Building back our meetings and group travel business remain a core component of our recovery strategy, as we promote NYC as the preferred destination for business events, directly solicit planners and decision makers, and showcase manageability of the destination.
We will launch The NYC Meetings Fund, designed to influence planners to host their next meeting or event in NYC by offsetting a percentage of the hard costs—up to $575,000 will be eligible for disbursement. We will continue targeting, and incentivizing where possible, big events (sports, entertainment, citywide conventions) like the DNC, Latin Grammys, NFL Draft, World Cup and UN Climate Action Summit (COP).
From a convention development perspective, we will continue to focus on the East Coast as a source of potential meetings and events, as it continues to be our top feeder market, followed by both mid-Atlantic and the West Coast, with the tech industry leading the way. Mid-Atlantic association business is beginning to recover, and corporate events remain strong, led by the tech industry. The incentive business is also beginning to recover, and small meetings (under 100 on peak) remain strong and represent the largest percentage of our definite bookings. We will also continue our partnerships with companies like HelmsBriscoe and Conference Direct to ensure they continue booking NYC and we stay top of mind as a destination of choice.
While the American Rescue Plan funding and additional city Blueprint funds were crucial to our ability to help generate visitation coming out of the pandemic in 2021–22, we now need to seek other dedicated, sustainable revenue sources in order to remain competitive as a global destination.
We will continue to work with City Hall and our partners to explore the development of a Tourism Investment District (TID) like those recently adopted in Washington, DC, and Boston, which involves a small assessment paid by the hotel guest per room night. New revenue generated by this assessment would be earmarked for the Convention & Visitors Bureau’s promotion of overnight stays in NYC, including leisure tourism marketing and attracting meetings, conventions and big events. This concept was included in the “New” New York Panel’s recommendation released in December 2022, and TIDs have been created in the majority of competing cities across the United States. New York City is the last remaining major destination in the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast without a TID funding stream. If created here, it would allow us to continue the robust international and domestic marketing required to grow hotel demand and benefit neighborhoods, local businesses and cultural organizations.
In the meantime, we will have additional digital ad sales opportunities made possible by the new website launch, inclusive of programmatic, new content packages and video sponsorship opportunities.
We are also revamping our sponsorship efforts, packaging up potential opportunities for our B2B programs such as Member Talks, Annual Meeting and Tourism Ready, and are evaluating the possible renewal of our global Mastercard partnership.
Our Membership Growth and Retention strategy will continue focusing on bringing acquisition back closer to pre-pandemic levels. Our Membership Development efforts will support our five-borough strategy through localized membership participation in all business and leisure programs, promotions and events, ensuring we are representing NYC in an equitable, inclusive manner around the world.
We will continue building upon the momentum we have achieved in the last two years with our multicultural content platforms and a video-first approach. Our Local Legends video series, featuring notable New Yorkers sharing their perspectives on some of the five boroughs’ most vibrant and culturally rich neighborhoods, launched in January and will continue through June.
We will also create an original photo and/or video series for The Asian Experience platform and will continue to develop written and photo content for all three multicultural platforms (Black, Latino and Asian), inserting a multicultural POV through all our content on an ongoing basis.
In terms of our diversity initiatives, we will continue our ongoing staff trainings, such as the past Band of Sisters gender bias training and GET Phluid gender expansive training, as well as cultural webinars like our Latin American Heritage Month webinar, Native American Heritage Month webinar and Black History Month hip-hop themed webinar, via our staff DEI Advisory Board.
Additionally, we’ll be creating offline opportunities for staff such as the following:
Finally, we will extend trainings, panel discussions and more to our membership throughout the year via our IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility) Committee, such as the above-mentioned Band of Sisters, GET Phluid and our Marketing to Diverse Audiences breakout session at the Annual Meeting.
A highlight of 2023 will be the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, shining a spotlight on the Bronx and hip-hop culture throughout the City. Countless notable rappers have come out of NYC, but the music will be just one part of this celebration. The 50th anniversary will pay tribute to all of hip-hop culture, including the art, dance, music and fashion that was born from it in NYC but continues to influence the world. Our new Hip-Hop 50 content hub launching in April will include cultural guides, Q&A interviews, profiles, social media extensions and more through December.
Promoting our neighborhoods and local businesses throughout the five boroughs has never been more important, as we work to encourage deeper, more meaningful exploration of our city. We will continue to promote our neighborhood guides and content packages under the Explore NYC campaign on an ongoing basis, leveraging paid media to drive awareness around that content. We will also continue to produce original content that showcases those local businesses and business owners, leveraging both influencers and creators to further extend that work. Ultimately, we are committed to the further growth of our editorial and video content that promotes the rich diversity, experiences and cultural vibrancy of our neighborhoods to attract new audiences and showcase community.
We remain committed to the critical work of our Tourism Ready program. The goal of Tourism Ready is twofold: to expand the number of businesses benefiting from the tourism economy and to grow and diversify our tourism product offerings across the five boroughs. In 2023, for the program’s seventh year, we will work even more closely with neighborhood marketing organizations to reach further into communities. The team has initiated pilot programs with the Long Island City Partnership and Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce with the Sunset Park BID and will look to expand upon this effort throughout the year.
Our suite of vibrancy programs designed to support local businesses across restaurants, Broadway, Off-Broadway, hotels and attractions will continue during key need periods in winter and summer. Specifically, we’ll be working to increase the performance and impact of those programs as well as the level of participation of local businesses in the five boroughs. We are adding a promotion for culture in May 2023, It’s Time for Culture, which will coincide with citywide large art events like Future Fair, Independent Art Fair, Frieze and NYCxDesign to illustrate that NYC is a perfect destination for culture lovers in May. We’ll also continue to support our retail sector with ongoing content amplification on our website and in social.
We will continue to stimulate leisure demand internationally from both a trade and consumer perspective, with our current tourism campaign, It’s Time for New York City, running through June 2023. Our next iteration of the campaign, designed to drive trip bookings via partnerships with airlines and tour operators in key feeder markets, will launch again this fall with a focus on our new branding.
Alongside this work, our team will continue to work with our 17 international rep offices to develop additional opportunities with the travel trade to keep NYC top of mind for travelers while ensuring the trade is continually educated on the latest product developments.
To that end, will be launching our new Travel Trade Academy (TTA) this spring, offering a deep-dive education on the specifics of each borough and our diverse, constantly changing product offering in an easy-to-navigate interface.
As we continue our ongoing engagement and content publishing in our Chinese social channels, we will continue monitoring and planning for the return of the Chinese visitor in the second half of the year, laying the groundwork for upcoming travel campaigns. In the meantime, we are renewing our focus on markets that are showing great growth over the last year such as India, Brazil and Australia.
We will ensure that there are equitable opportunities for exposure and participation in our programs for smaller businesses through two reverse sales missions per year in market, which provide affordable, valuable engagement with the travel trade. We will also expand our scholarship program for trade shows and sales missions, which helps to offset participation fees for smaller organizations, again ensuring the diversity of NYC’s product offering is properly represented around the world.
During the 12-month period ending June 30, 2022, NYC & Company recognized $25.3 million of the revenue received from the City through the American Rescue Plan, in addition to $21.2 million from the city contract and $1.3 million in restoration of the prior year PEG adjustment. The company also received $1.8 million in funding from the City to directly support NYC Homecoming. In FY23 and beyond, the company’s city contract is subject to more PEG reductions, which are expected to negatively impact revenue by at least $3.7 million over the next four years. In FY22, the company recognized $3.2 million in PPP forgiveness and private revenue began to recover slightly; we anticipate that continuing through FY23.
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Our NYC Like a New Yorker campaign took geographical nouns, like “Queens,” and transformed them into verbs, speaking to the dynamism that is the core of the energy of the five boroughs. The aim was to encourage travelers to explore neighborhoods across the five boroughs—particularly those that may be lesser known.
While the It’s Time for New York City campaign invited out-of-town and international audiences to visit the destination, NYC Like a New Yorker spoke to those who were already here in the five boroughs. We developed a multichannel marketing and communications effort aimed at supporting small businesses around NYC and lifting BIPOC- and women-owned enterprises, so that all experienced the economic benefits of our industry.
Running from April to August 2022, the program featured one borough each month in a press release that showcased its essential neighborhood attractions and characteristics. This campaign was recognized by the U.S. Travel Association with the 2022 Destiny Award for “The Road Less Traveled” in August 2022.
