Meet Boston recently completed our fourth international trade mission, this time journeying to Milan, Italy where we met with dozens of Italian travel media and tour operators. We brought with us unique storytellers from the culinary world as well as partners from the Boston Public Arts Triennial, City Hall and FIFA Boston.
From Italy I traveled directly to Savannah, GA for the DI CEO Summit. The prevailing topic was of course how the administration’s trade policies will impact travel and tourism. We are all monitoring the situation closely, particularly as it relates to Canada and other top international markets. Overall, we now anticipate that international travel to the US will fall by 5% this year, with Canada falling most steeply at 15%.
We’ve been thrilled to see how impactful the lineup of sporting events has been over the first quarter. Meet Boston was very involved in bringing both the Four Nations Face Off and the ISU Figure Skating Championships to Boston and both have been a boon to our visitor economy.
Thanks to all of our restaurant partners who participated in our biggest Dine Out Boston yet. 210 restaurants joined our winter program, which ran for 3 weeks for the first time ever and the results were robust - over 40M in earned media impressions and over 1.6M web views.
I am honored to be the recipient of BU’s School of Hospitality’s ICON Award. We’ve worked with BU on several joint initiatives and I’m excited to host a panel this week at the Hospitality Leadership Summit.
