Visit Boise Receives U.S. Travel Destiny Award

VisitBoise.com named top travel destination website by the U.S. Travel Association

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Nollie Haws

(208) 472-0586
Nollie.Haws@Fahlgren.com

Boise, Idaho (August 25, 2023) – Visit Boise’s refreshed website was named best-in-class at the U.S. Travel Association’s 39th annual Educational Seminar for Tourism Organizations (ESTO) conference this week in Savannah, GA. The U.S. Travel Association presents its annual Mercury and Destiny Awards at the conference recognizing excellence and creativity in destination marketing and inspiring visitation in 21 categories. Visit Boise, a nonprofit organization that promotes Boise as a premier destination for leisure, sports and convention travel, received a Destiny Award in the destination website category.
Visit Boise, in collaboration with Duft Watterson, took an intentional, methodical approach to refresh the website and create a best-in-class user experience that simultaneously supported Visit Boise’s primary business objective of generating tourism and hotel revenue for the city. The team spent months researching visitor behavior and creating customer journey maps that aligned with its top audience segments. Through this, they discovered a content-first approach would achieve all goals. The approach proved incredibly successful, noting impressive performance metrics since launching in May 2022:

• 95% increase in new users to the website
• 919% increase year-over-year (2021 to 2022) in engaged sessions (the number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event or had two or more page views).29,000 returning visitors at a 100% increase year-over-year
• 35% increase in average return rate to the website
• 46% increase in out-of-state website visitors
• 578% user growth from Atlanta and 788% user growth from Austin (two of Boise’s target markets)

ESTO is an annual conference for destination marketing professionals from city, regional, and state tourism offices. The Destiny Awards are awarded to city and regional destinations while the Mercury Awards are awarded to state tourism offices. Visit Idaho also received a Mercury Award in the category of integrated marketing and messaging campaign for its Beyond Words campaign.

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About Visit Boise: Boise is a rare blend of accessible outdoors and eclectic urban offerings. This city, with a river running through it, boasts unlimited recreation, interesting and unique sites and attractions, and diverse cultural offerings. The mission of Visit Boise is to inspire people to explore Boise. Visit Boise’s values are resiliency, innovation, collaboration and service. Find out more at VisitBoise.com.

About the U.S. Travel Association: U.S. Travel Association is the national, non-profit organization representing the $1.2 trillion travel industry, an essential contributor to our nation’s economy and success. U.S. Travel produces programs and insights and advocates for policies to increase travel to and within the United States. Visit ustravel.org for information and recovery-related data.