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Virginia Beach Ranks Among TripAdvisor’s Top 25 Beaches in the USA

TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel site with more than 315 million members and over 500 million reviews and opinions of hotels, restaurants, attractions and other travel-related businesses recently named Virginia Beach in their list of top 25 best beaches in the USA. While our coastal city ranked alongside beach destinations on both U.S. coasts, and across the Hawaiian Islands, we are the only East Coast beach destination north of Florida to make the cut. The story was picked by USA Today and can be found here:  goo.gl/L9Wdh6. Wondering who took first place is the USA? Congratulations go to Clearwater Beach, Florida.

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Notes from City Manager Dave Hansen’s Department Leadership Team Meeting 2/28/18

Deputy City Manager (DCM) Tom Leahy opened the meeting with a discussion of sea level rise and the impacts to Virginia Beach. The group was polled on their knowledge of sea level rise on the web site www.publicinput.com/2383  You are encouraged to take this survey yourself to determine your knowledge.  This Public Input application is an enterprise solution and is available for departments to use. It was recently used for the Dome Site public survey. Do you know what the average elevation of Virginia Beach is?

David Bradley, Director of Management Services (the budget office) presented findings of the bi-annual Citizens’ Satisfaction Survey. This telephone survey polls 500 citizens of Virginia Beach once every two years. Compared to other cities nationally, the results were very favorable.

Survey Highlights:

  • 94% of citizens very satisfied with living in Virginia Beach
  • 2% overall satisfaction rating for value as a taxpayer
  • 94% say Virginia Beach is a good place to live
  • 7% of citizens use public beaches
  • 8% reported City Employees are courteous (down 5.2% in two years)

Full survey results are on Beachnet: Survey Results

Dave stressed that we all need to be cheerleaders for the great thing the City does.

Warren Harris, Director of Economic Development, introduced Chris Lloyd, Sr. VP of McGuire Woods Consulting who presented the state of economic development. Chris helps businesses with public private partnerships and is a lobbyist in Richmond. He introduced the topic with a discussion about the disrupters in the economy like Lyft, Uber, Amazon, AirBnB and Pandora. He noted the demise of travel agents, insurance agents and stockbroker’s whose store fronts have become web based services. Virginia Beach added 2,508 new jobs last year, had $240M in investment and added 1.5 million new square feet of buildings. The public generally has a negative view of developers. They want more transparency, less backroom deals, less silos in government and to see returns on investment.

Dave presented results from City Council’s recent retreat. Each year the Council sequesters to discuss upcoming priorities for the City. The results can be found here on Beachnet: 2018 City Council Priorities

Note that on slide 4, Policy Agenda, that the Sports Center, Dome Site and Pier Place Development Agreements are top priorities. Of particular interest are the private investments associated with two of the projects. While the City may contribute $24 million (M) for a pier, private investors are slated to add another $250 M in surrounding projects. The Dome site may need $66 M and another $24 M for parking from the public, but it gains $250 M in private investment.  Dave reminded everyone that in order to remain competitive as an east coast resort destination that we needed state of the art attractions.

Announcements from the group –

  • Virginia Beach Human Services will be presenting a Mental Health Forum April 12 at VBCC. The goal being to provide a coordinated and holistic response to citizens in need of mental health services and their families.
  • A new session of the City’s Mentoring program will begin soon. For information on applying to become a mentor or mentee, call 385-8807
  • Police Chief Cervera said farewell to a 29.5 year veteran of the force who is retiring. He was thanked for his service.
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Administrative Services Division Tours The Cavalier Hotel

As a group, the Administrative Services Division did a self-guided tour at The Cavalier Hotel on Tuesday, February 27, 2018.  It was amazing with so much history behind this beautiful hotel. Cliff Myers had some fond memories and gave us a lot of tidbit about the hotel.  Cliff Myers was employed at The Cavalier Hotel from 1990 – 1992 as a front desk clerk, 2000-2005 as the Director of Sales & Marketing and as the Assistant General Manager.

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Smart Meetings Article: Virginia’s Sizzling Culinary Scene

We worked with Smart Meetings on a story about the culinary scene in Virginia Beach for a broader story about meetings in the state of Virginia and wanted to share the placement that ran this afternoon: Virginia’s Sizzling Culinary Scene- https://www.smartmeetings.com/destinations/105974/virginias-sizzling-culinary-scene

While it’s a broader story about the destination, we also secured a quote from a previous client as you may recall, which was also included in the story.

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Popular Reality Series Show ‘The Bachelor’ Creates a Global Buzz about Virginia Beach

With a viewer base of 6.4 million, it’s no wonder that traffic to the city’s tourism website experienced a huge surge following Monday night’s showing of “The Bachelor” featuring a contestant from our coastal city. The show’s crew was in town this past November to film bachelorette Lauren Burnham of Virginia Beach and this season’s bachelor, auto racer Arie Luyendyk, Jr.  In Monday night’s episode, the couple visited Virginia Beach so Luyendyk could meet Burnham’s family. They were filmed enjoying horseback riding on the beach, climbing the lighthouse and having dinner.

Using Google Trends, we are able to measure interest in a particular topic across Google search in real time. The visuals below represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart worldwide for the chosen timeframe. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the search term during the chosen timeframe, while a value of 50 means the term is half as popular as the peak.

So how did people react to seeing Virginia Beach on “The Bachelor?” As you can see from the following graphs, from Feb. 15 – Feb. 20 interest in the search term “Virginia Beach” peaked on February 19 during the airing of the show. Likewise, if you look at the data on the day of airing, you can see interest in the search term “Virginia Beach” peaking around 9:16 pm and then spiking slightly again three hours later when the show aired on the West Coast. Not only did the destination see an increase in search interest, but looking at “Virginia Beach horseback riding” as a search term we can clearly see the positive effects of being featured on a show with viewership like that of “The Bachelor.”

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Foundations for New Supervisors Graduates

Maria Aragon, Acting Manager of the Visitor Information Center, and Robin Moore-Hall, Operations Supervisor at the Virginia Beach Convention Center both graduated from the week-long Foundations for New Supervisors course on February 16, 2018.