“From #LouisvilleLove to #ShareTheLex”

July 20, 2015.

Today marks my first day on the job as the Vice President of Marketing at VisitLEX, which is the marketing name for the Lexington Convention & Visitors Bureau. For those of you who are still unsure about what a convention & visitors bureau is, most cities have three main entities that serve the city: the Mayor’s Office, a chamber of commerce and a tourism office. The tourism office is basically the marketing arm of the city commissioned to bring in meetings, conventions, sporting events, group travel and general leisure travel. Not all tourism offices are called CVBs. Some are called tourist commissions and others are called Visit “City Name”. Not all tourism offices are structured the same either. Some are responsible for leisure travel only, some are responsible for meetings only and others are sometimes responsible for operating a convention center or some other facility. And not all are funded the same either. So as you can see, our industry can be quite confusing.

Now that we’ve got all the preliminaries out of the way, let me say that I’m very excited about this new opportunity in Lexington. After all, Lexington is the city where I graduated college, was initiated into Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc., met my closest friends and most importantly, met my beautiful wife Shannon. To the outsider, Lexington has long been viewed as direct competition to Louisville, and I’d say that it’s partly because of basketball and partly because Louisville and Lexington are the two biggest cities in the state of Kentucky. Both cities can compete for tourism business, but Lexington and Louisville are more complementary than they are competitors, and both make for a great tag team in the game of tourism. Both cities have unique assets that set them apart, but similar aspects that can be shared.

With me being “new” to Lexington again, I invite you to follow me on Twitter or Instagram as I explore and get reacquainted with a city I’ve known for years. From the outside looking in, the growth of Lexington has been awesome over the past few years and there are some greater things coming in the future. I look forward to being a part of the movement as we at VisitLEX strive to make Lexington one of the top tourism destinations in America.

After all – Southern Starts Here.

To check out more of what we are doing, visit us on the web at http://www.visitlex.com and http://www.sharethelex.com.