SUMMARY OF EFFORTS

Stocked Full of Dining

$25.9 MIL

Tax Generated by Direct Travel Spending

21.2% YOY

For the past decade, Visit Stockton has hosted a traditional Restaurant Week, where restaurants opted-in to a 10-day dining promotion. Historically, we say around 30 restaurants participated in the promotion, and they created a special menu that Visit Stockon promoted through digital and traditional marketing. Over the years, we saw a decline in the number of restaurants that wanted to participate, and after 2020, we found that the program wasn’t seeing the same success it did in years past (labor costs, food costs, etc. were all factors in that decline). We decided to shift from the norm and take our own approach.

To better represent and promote all dining options in Stockton, we opted to take a digital-only approach that did not require any additional labor or efforts from our local restaurants. We also took our 10-day promotion and expanded it through the entire month of January. We promoted three dining blogs and two dining videos a week on social media, ran diningspecific commercials on digital television, did a website takeover highlighting dining options across the city, and encouraged social sharing with weekly giveaways. We felt that this program shift better represented our mission, reaching greater audiences and expanding the local businesses we served.

Our new “Restaurant Month” promotion saw great success in its first year, and using our research platform Placer.ai, we discovered a 21% increase in local restaurant visitation in 2023 compared to 2022. We plan to expand on this new program and continue to perfect it in 2024.

San Joaquin County Tourism Recovery Grant

Visit Stockton was enthusiastic about our re-application for the San Joaquin County Tourism Recovery Grant which focused on attracting a higher-spend audience to Stockton. According to our research, Stockton is the highest-visited city within the county, as well as having the longest dwell time, and visitors often visit other communities while on their trip to Stockton. We used that data as validation to request a $100,000 grant, which we were awarded in March 2023.

$100,000 grant awarded

We have specified certain recreational and content pillars that drive visitation to our area (dining, sports, family recreation, etc.) and created a 6-month video promotion program to distribute through EffecTV to our regional drive audience. The promotion lasts through September, and we will provide a full report at its conclusion.

Tourism Breakfast

Our Annual Tourism Breakfast is an opportunity for our organization to share our successes from the year prior and share plans and goals for the upcoming year with our partners and stakeholders. This year, we had the honor of having representatives from Visit California in the audience, as well as a presentation by the VP of Marketing, Lynn Carpenter, which shared the VC program plans, explained how our partners can become more involved, and was a great way for us to highlight the Stockton