Taxable activity in the City of Prescott is also improving with the April report showing a 4.3% increase with restaurant/bars up 5.36%, retail up 7.68% and hotels up 15.21% (sales tax, not bed tax).  All of these numbers are preliminary, unaudited and could change. Year to Date taxable activity is up 5.76%.

With the good news, there is inevitably some (potentially) bad news as well. Sports tournaments are major contributors to our local economy across the Tri Cities and two of the larger tournaments are in danger of being lured away by competing destinations. These include AIA's volleyball tournament in November and the wrestling tournament in February. Both of these tournaments have a significant economic impact during our off season and replacing this lost revenue would be very difficult.  Some of the options that AIA is looking at include the possibility of using Phoenix area school gyms at a much lower cost and an offer from Tucson for free use of the Tucson Convention Center.  The perception by some coaches and parents of "price gouging" and restrictive cancellation clauses by Prescott area hotels is contributing to a very real possibility that these tournaments may choose to go elsewhere. Officials from the Town of Prescott Valley, the City of Prescott, the lodging association and others are working with AIA to try and prevent this from happening.

The Prescott Office of Tourism attended the USTA International Pow Wow, a travel trade show attended by over 5,000 delegates from 70 countries. This year's Pow Wow was in Los Angeles from April 21-25. Leads from the show are being distributed to the appropriate parties. A complete trip report will soon be available from the Prescott Office of Tourism upon request.

During USTA's International Pow Wow, a $150 million marketing blitz to promote the U.S. to travelers worldwide was unveiled to Pow Wow delegates. The new ad campaign is in response to a drop in the country's overall share of world travelers in the decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. Travel Association initiated the campaign with the support of several large tourism groups and travel businesses, and it was approved by Congress as part of the Travel Promotion Act of 2010. To draw foreign travelers back, the campaign will launch billboards, magazine ads, online videos and television commercials, emblazoned in colorful images of city scenes, forests and beaches and the message "Discover America." The marketing blitz will begin in May in Canada, Britain and Japan, followed later in Brazil, South Korea, India and Germany.

As part of the campaign Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Rosanne Cash wrote and recorded "Land of Dreams". We invite you to download the song "Land of Dreams".  Please feel free to forward it to friends and family and share it on Facebook and Twitter.

We have heard from a number of lodging properties that packages including golf and other activities are selling well. Since we have a number of packages being promoted (for FREE!) on www.Visit-Prescott.com, we have displayed golf packages on a separate page from all other package offers.

As you can see from the web report below, a lot of people look for event information on our website so we recently made it easier to find events with the option to sort by month and year. This option has been available for some time on the mobile friendly version of the tourism website, and we are pleased that we now have this upgrade available on the regular version of "Visit-Prescott.com".