Tc Convention & Visitor'S Bureau

“Membership of the visitors bureau consists of area businesses that operate within the local tourism industry”

“The visitors bureau consists of business members that elect from among themselves individuals to participate on the board of directors”

“Form 990 is reviewed by the executive director when presented by the bureau's auditing and tax preparation firm and made available to members of the board upon request”

“Conflicts of interest are reviewed annually as well as on an as needed basis during a regularly scheduled meeting of the governing board”

“Upon the completion of each year, the board of directors selects a compensation review committee that evaluates the organization's performance, as determined by the audited financial statements, against the goals and financial objectives as defined by the board. The results of this evaluation help determine the compensation of the executive director.”

“The board approves the annual operating budget which includes a review of staff compensation costs. For staff positions, the executive director evaluates compensation in comparison with information provided by "destination marketing association international- and the "michigan association of convention and visitors bureaus".”

“No documents available to the public”

“Traverse city tourism corporation”

“In 2018, we engaged in a significant amount of advertising to attract the leisure market including the use of digital campaigns, social media campaigns, radio campaigns, print campaigns in newspapers and magazines, direct mail campaigns to targeted markets, outdoor billboard campaigns, and e-marketing campaigns with various web and e-newsletter initiatives. Tct also partnered with travel michigan with the national partnership program where we invested 600,000 that was matched with an additional 600,000 from travel michigan for a national 30-second television ad that aired march, april, and may. Tct also received feature placement on michigan.org. In an effort to build our shoulder and off-season time periods, we balanced our advertising spend throughout the year spending 21 percent of our budget for winter promotion, a combined 56 percent for spring and fall shoulder seasons and 23 percent for the summer season. We also directed 62 percent of our marketing spend to out-of-state markets to support our objective to grow our non-michigan based business. Tct also participated in a number of consumer tradeshows throughout the year including: fifth third riverbank run chicago travel and adventure show chicago golf show rock'n roll marathon chicago novi golf show dallas golf show grand rapids wine, beer & food festival in addition, we partnered with the west michigan tourist association (wmta) at additional consumer shows where they distributed our traverse city marketing materials. In the international market, collaborated with travel michigan and great lakes usa on marketing materials, trade shows and sales missions. Tct is also very active with public relations efforts. We regularly send press releases about new destination information to the travel media, as well as visit markets for radio, broadcast, print and digital interviews and promotions. Throughout 2018, we also hosted 53 travel writers in the destination to allow them a first-hand destination experience, distributed 14 press releases about traverse city information, and appeared in at least 50 occasions of various broadcast.”

“The tct website is the primary "call to action" in our advertising and promotion efforts. In 2018, we had 1,871,137 web sessions and 1,367,966 users on the traversecity.com website as recorded by google analytics. Our top five markets that generated web traffic for 2018 were michigan, illinois, ohio, indiana and california. In addition to the web traffic results, the lodging assessments collected by tct in 2018, which is a gauge of overall market lodging revenues, increased by 3.7% percent over 2017. In our group sales efforts, tct generated 296 group leads for our member lodging properties in 2018. These leads represented 69,668 room nights. Tct also hosted 68 site inspections for future group business in 2018. Our visitor center assisted more than 48,000 visitors in 2018, offering assistance with information on things to see and do while in the traverse city area. This includes assisting in making lodging reservations. Tct produces a variety of marketing collateral pieces to promote our destination with the primary marketing tool being our annual traverse city area guide. In 2018 we produced and distributed 300,000 of these magazines to consumers interested in receiving information about the traverse city area.”

“Book/tax depreciation -1,730”