Alexandria Unveils New Tourism and Convention Website

Alexandria has a new website designed to motivate travel to the area and increase visitor spending, which was unveiled at the Tourism Marketing Summit this month.

The new site allows visitors to research information about Alexandria as well as directly book plane tickets and reserve hotel rooms, all via the portal visitalexandriava.com.

For example, a tourist coming into town can now go online to the revamped site and purchase plane tickets, book a rental car and local hotel room, buy tickets to visit the Mount Vernon Estate and purchase a ticket for a D.C. Metro food tour, which includes Alexandria restaurants.

“In a single year, visitors to Alexandria spend more than $650 million and generate $22.4 million in city tax revenue—and that lowers our property tax rate by 7 cents,” said Mayor Bill Euille, speaking at the event held at the . “In the past five years, visitor spending in Alexandria has increased nearly 17 percent.” The average rate of increase for other areas in Virginia was 7 percent.

Keynote speaker Elizabeth McLaughlin, vice president of research for Virginia Tourism Corporation, noted that tourism brings $19 billion of revenue into the Commonwealth and $22 million in local taxes for Alexandria.

McLaughlin added that a lot of her group’s research shows that 75 percent of travelers say “life is too complicated” and are seeking vacations and tourist spots where they can “turn the gadgets off” and catch their breath.

ACVA also promoted the city’s new tourism Facebook page at Visit Alexandria Virginia.