Rachel Pulvino

Episode 57: Driving Tourism is a Collaborative Effort, with Rachel Laber Pulvino

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Nicole Mahoney chats withNicole Mahoney chats withNicole Mahoney chats withNicole Mahoney chats with

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In this episode, you will learn about how everyone can chip in to drive visitors to a region and the economic impact that provides from Rachel Laber Pulvino.

Rachel Laber Pulvino is a Rochester native who has the privilege of promoting her hometown on a daily basis as the Director of Public Relations and Communications for Visit Rochester.

In this role Rachel is regularly reaching out to regional, national and international media to share Rochester’s story and help media and visitors alike discover the activities and attractions that make Rochester an ideal destination. One recent accomplishment was seeing the Rochester Lilac Festival be included in The Weather Channel’s list of “10 Places You Have to See in May” as well as helping Rochester be named America’s 10th Favorite City by Travel + Leisure.

Raised in Rochester, Rachel attended SUNY Geneseo, where she earned a B.A. in Communication and continued on to the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University for graduate school, where she earned an M.S. in Public Relations.

Rachel is an active member of the Public Relations Society of America, Rochester Chapter, serving on the organization’s board of directors, along with volunteering with the Women’s Foundation of Genesee Valley and the SUNY Geneseo Regional Alumni committee.

More on Rachel’s Background

Thank you so much for joining me today, Rachel!

Thank you so much for having me, Nicole! I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with you.

I am also equally thrilled to have you on. Many of my listeners know that my office is located in the Rochester NY area, so I’m very excited to have somebody on from Visit Rochester to talk about all of the great things that are you doing in travel and tourism and destination marketing. Before we get started, you have an awesome bio and I know it only tells part of the story about who you are, so, Rachel could you give us a little bit more context to your background and your journey?

Absolutely! So first and foremost I am a Rochesterian, and I think it’s really important to note that I am from Rochester originally, although, through the course of my career I actually spent a couple of years away from Rochester. You noted that I went to Geneseo for undergrad and Syracuse for grad school, and it was while I was studying at Syracuse that I got what I often refer to as an itch. It was an itch and a desire to try it and be in the big city of New York and to see if I could really, you know they say, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere”. So, being that my background was in public relations and communications, I decided to move to New York City right after finishing grad school and see if I could do it and if I could find a job in my chosen industry in New York, and I was very lucky to end up working in the public relations industry.

Interestingly, it was not in travel but actually in healthcare. I worked in PR in New York City for just about three years, and then after those three years I moved back to my hometown of Rochester. I have to say that spending that time away from Rochester has been instrumental in really shaping my appreciation for my community now. If I hadn’t spent that time away, I don’t know that I would really realize that I would necessarily just how special the place Rochester is. So now here I am coming up on four years being back in Rochester, and coming into my two year anniversary with Visit Rochester soon, and I can say without a doubt that having spent time away from home, in a city like New York, has only made me appreciate Rochester that much more, because I’m able to really see that all the really incredible experiences we have here and things to do and the wide range of cultural attractions, they really do compare to bigger cities. Cities much bigger than Rochester including New York.

My time in New York City was really instrumental to helping me better appreciate where I was from which, of course, translates as to how I’m able to do my job as the Director of Communications and PR here for Visit Rochester. I moved back to Rochester coming up on four years ago. I spent two years working for another agency here in town and it’s funny I wasn’t even actually looking for a new job at the time this opening came to be, but I saw the description and I thought, oh my goodness, there is a professional opportunity to promote Rochester? It really felt like a dream come true, so I threw my hat in the ring and I feel very blessed every day to be able to come into work here at Visit Rochester and to promote our community and really help contribute towards the major economic driver that is tourism in Rochester among our counties. That’s a little bit more embellishment on my bio I guess you could say. I had that privilege of having that time in New York City, which has really just helped me appreciate Rochester.

I joke too that in the time I was away that it really incredible forces are at work here in Rochester and we’ve got just wonderful new restaurants and as I said the entertainment and the cultural attractions, I mean, there is just a bit of a Renaissance happening here right now and I just feel so lucky to be a part of that Renaissance in my own small way.

I think that’s really awesome. And what a cool perspective to have, having moved away and then coming back. You hear that a lot from people or just in general, you know the saying goes, “The grass is always greener,” right? It sometimes takes that perspective of being an outsider to really understand what is here, and I think that just gives you such a great advantage with your job because you’re able to kind of see it from a different view point than just being, not having that experience of living away. I think that’s really cool, and I love it when I ask my guests to tell me in their own words their story because it really does offer so much more context and information to our conversation so, thank you for sharing all that and I’m sure it’ll probably be a bit of a theme as we talk about these next questions.

Rochester, NY’s Unique Assets

I’d like to dive right in into the questions and we like to focus on this show on both creativity and collaboration. It is hard usually to talk about one without talking about the other because they are so closely tied to each other, especially in the travel and tourism industry. We’re going to start with creativity and understanding that the tourism and hospitality industry is very competitive. And I would say not just competitive in terms of competing for one destination competing against another, but you’re also kind of competing against people’s time and what people are doing to balance their time and how they’re spending their time.

So, what have you done or what has Rochester done to really try and stand out from the crowd?

Well, here in Rochester and working at Visit Rochester, which I’d be remiss to say is the official promotional tourism agency from Monroe County. We’re very lucky that we have incredible assets and a really special product to promote and to share as we work to attract both leisure and also meeting convention attendees and delegates. We often refer to Rochester as the cultural capital of upstate New York, and for a city of our size we just are so lucky to have an abundance of arts and cultural experiences and incredible family-friendly experiences. Of course we’re very uniquely positioned as the front door to the Finger Lakes so we’ve got the incredible wine and agricultural region of the Finger Lakes literally in our backyard. We have kind of the best of both worlds and we really work to promote our unique position in the marketplace, like I said, not just leisure travelers but also meeting and convention delegates.

And we also have the benefit of being an underrated destination, and I embrace that whole heartedly because that perception that someone may have of Rochester. Sometimes if I say to someone, “Close your eyes and if I say Rochester, New York, what do you picture?” Sometimes people will think of snow, they’ll think of cold, they’ll think of Kodak, but we really have limitless options and limitless opportunities of things to see and do here. I embrace taking that kind of underrated perception that people have and really just turning it on it’s head. In my position I work with travel writers so I’m regularly taking people who’ve never been to Rochester, New York, and I get to introduce them to the community, and I really get no greater joy than seeing just the awe and amazement on people’s faces when I show them the 96 foot waterfall in the middle of Downtown Rochester that is High Falls.

Or if I take them to see the beautiful collection of lilacs, which is the largest in North America, in bloom at Highland Park. There are just so many ways that we can really surprise and delight our visitors, so we take our perception and we turn it on its head and utilize just the incredible assets that we have and this rich tourism product that we have here in Rochester and the Finger Lakes and we run with it.

I really like that kind of perspective on using this perception of being underrated or an underrated destination to your benefit. I hear what you’re saying when you say that you can really surprise folks by showing them what is here. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you use that? What would be a typical, since you work with travel writers, phone call? What would that look like as Rachel Laber’s reaching out to a travel writer to convince them that Rochester is worth covering? What are some of the things that you use?

Oh sure. Well first and foremost, I always ask folks if they’ve not only if they’ve been to Rochester, but if they’ve heard of Rochester because sometimes even just getting that baseline awareness can be a challenge. Then I really dig deep into what they’re interested in because the neat thing about Rochester and the Finger Lakes is that we just have something for everyone here. Whether they’re interested in the arts and culture or history or food or golf or outdoor recreation, we really have something for everyone. If they’re into art and culture, I say to them, well did you know that Rochester has Memorial Art Gallery, which has the best depth and breadth of a collection in New York State, outside of New York City? Or perhaps you’re interested in Geva Theater which is the highest attended regional theater in the northeast outside of New York City. Or if they’re into history I tell them all about Susan B. Anthony and the legacy that she’s left here in Rochester in addition to George Eastman and Frederick Douglas, and so on and so forth.

[bctt tweet=”“The neat thing about Rochester and the Finger Lakes is that whether someone is interested in the arts and culture or history or food or outdoor recreation, we really have something for everyone.” – @rachellaber #WhyCollaborate #podcast”]

I really try to arm myself with really just as much interesting and surprising information to try and show someone, especially a travel writer, why Rochester’s worth a closer look. One thing too I’m finding that travel writers and also I think just leisure visitors and consumers, they’re always looking for the unexpected. They’re looking for new experiences. They’ve been to the major cities, they’ve seen there, been there, done that. They’re looking for the undiscovered, the on-the-radar kinds of places and that really is Rochester in a nutshell. We were going back to the Travel and Leisure ranking you had mentioned at the start of the program. We were named one of the most underrated destinations, and what that says to perspective travelers is that, hey you can come here and really be on the cusp of something great.

We have this wonderful community of makers and creatives and movers and shakers bringing new ideas and new dining concepts and opening up new breweries and wineries and new artists and things that are coming here and putting down roots here and just making this community a very special place to not only visit but to work and live. I really just embrace the idea of being underrated and I just try to use all the great things that are going on here as a means to really capture someone’s interest. The best part is, if I can actually get a travel writer to come to Rochester to what we call a familiarization tour, because once I get them here and once they see it and experience it, I don’t even have to say anything else, they’re sold. They can really get a sense of the vibrancy and the fact there is the something kind of special happening here right now.

Yeah, that’s really great. Again back to that idea of using the underrated to your advantage and how you kind of turned that around. I love how you’ve made the connection between underrated, which somebody might think of as a negative but connected it to, actually because it’s underrated we offer this totally unique experience, because there’s some many people that maybe haven’t actually had this experience yet and so you’re playing that up which actually makes it more attractive as a destination, right?

Yeah absolutely.

Promoting Rochester is a Collaborative Effort

I’m gonna change gears just a little bit because I like to talk about challenges or adversity in that I think that we really learn a lot from facing a challenge and that creativity really does come out in full force when we’re trying to solve for a challenge. I’m wondering if you can share with us a challenge that your organization has faced and maybe a creative solution that came from that.

I think that for a destination like Rochester, as I kind of referenced before, a challenge that we continue to face is again that perception and not just the perception of other people who we want to attract to come here, but sometimes working to shape the perception of our own local residents. That awareness of understanding of our organization among our local residents coupled with an appreciation for the destination in and of itself, it can be something that we are constantly working on as an organization. It touches the perception that local residents have in our community, it really touches every section of our organization. So, for our meetings and conventions sales team for example, they closely work with and rely on the referrals of local contacts who are engaged and involved in the different associations that can help bring their next meeting, convention or event to Rochester. So they’re constantly working to help our local contacts understand the great product that we have here, more affordable, more accessible.

We can host conventions from 10 to 10,000 and helping our locals understand that they should recommend Rochester for their next meeting, convention, or event and that they should feel proud to do so. Likewise, from the leisure and visitor standpoint, just encouraging people to take pride in inviting their friends and family to visit Rochester. Whether it’s for an event like the Lilac Festival or the Jazz Festival, or if folks are coming home for the holidays, how can we make sure that they’re taking advantage of all the great new things to see and do. Also just encouraging folks to have pride and where you’re from and where you live because it’s that kind of pride and word of mouth that will help us just further spread the news that there’s something happening in Rochester. This is really a bit of a Renaissance for us, and be a part of it. All the while reinforcing the message that tourism is a major economic driver.

We have an economic impact of more than a billion dollars in Monroe County for the tourism hospitality industry, so helping our local audience understand that when you encourage friends and family to come and stay in our hotels and go to our restaurants, you’re contributing to jobs, you’re contributing to the economic impact so it all adds up to a greater good, if you will. But we are constantly working against that perception of people thinking, oh there’s nothing to do here, this and that. I always say, if you there’s nothing to do in Rochester they are not looking hard enough, because I could find you any day of the week I can give you at least ten places to go. We work hard to better arm our local audience with just information and facts of things to feel good about and all the more reasons to recommend Rochester.

[bctt tweet=”“It’s up to us to help our local audience understand that when they encourage friends and family to come to our hotels and restaurants, they’re contributing to jobs and the economic impact.” – @rachellaber #WhyCollaborate #podcast”]

It’s something that we’re always working on. In 2018, we have an even stronger focus on using digital and social media to engage with our local audience and giving them content and visuals and things like that they’re going to want to share, and it will help them expand their own understanding of their community. On the meeting and convention side, we have a renewed focus on a local ambassador program that really hits at what I was saying in terms of recommend Rochester for your next meeting or event. If you are part of an association, and you’re traveling to X,Y and Z city for your conferences, why not bring it here to Rochester? Those are a couple of the ways that we’ll be working to address that challenge of perception and just enhancing awareness of local audiences of proof of what Rochester is and why they should recommend Rochester.

Yeah I think that, that’s a very interesting way to think about the role of the tourism office in serving the local community, which goes beyond just attracting those visitors here so they spend their time overnight here in the community and leave some money behind, but it’s beyond that and trying to find those ways to connect to the local audiences, both for what you had mentioned but to get them to invite friends and family to come, or to get them to invite their professional organization to come have a meeting here I think is a challenge that many destinations face, and I think that’s just a really good point that you made in how you’re going about doing that with the local ambassador program and with the digital and social channels and how you’re going to be engaging with them.

But as you were talking it actually made me think of another thing that I think is very unique to Visit Rochester in particular, and that is, because I’m here in this community and participate in your organization and that is the Visitor Industry Council, I bet many of our listeners don’t know what the Visitor Industry Council is so could you share a little bit about that? Because that certainly is, to me, an important part of this local connection that you just described.

Yes, so we at Visit Rochester are unique from other organization like ours in New York State in that we are a membership-based organization. We have upwards of 450 member businesses that are all kind of touch what we call the visitor industry. So, hotels, attractions, other businesses, restaurants, service providers so on and so forth, and together these companies, our members, make up the Visitor Industry Council. Once a month, we have a meeting of our membership, where we bring together representatives from all of our member businesses and they come together on a monthly basis, and they actually through the Visitor Industry Council, it’s a working arm of our membership, so there’s a steering committee, which is comprised of representatives from all the various segments. So, its sleep and see and do and eat and hotels and service providers etc., and they set the course really for the Visitor Industry Council for the year.

Like I said, there’s a monthly meeting with robust programming, different speakers, and ways to bring the community into our world and to help provide more information and educational opportunities and professional development opportunities to our members. The Visitor Industry Council is just a very special group of people. We get anywhere from 100 to I’d say 125 people at every meeting, which is a really great representation of our membership. The V.I.C. itself has been in place now for going on 30 years, or actually I think even more than that, so just the network and the relationships that have been formed over the years is just really something special. It enables us to kind of be that conduit to bring all these different representatives from the local hospitality and tourism industry together and to collaborate with one another and to create meaningful change for the visitor industry by working together on different projects and committees and task forces.

It’s just a really special group of people, and I encourage anyone listening in the Rochester area that would like to learn more about the Visitor Industry Council to reach out to us, visitrochester.com, and learn more. It’s just a wonderful group of people and a great fabric of our institution.

I agree and I’ve been involved in it for quite a long time actually. What I think is really special about it is just how engaged the members are in those committees and task forces and different initiatives that you mentioned, and it’s all volunteer. They’re very engaged, and I just think it makes a huge difference in what you and the rest of the staff are able to accomplish. So thanks for sharing that with us.

Yeah and thank you yourself for being a part of our Visitor Industry Council.

What’s New for Visit Rochester in 2018

Now, just looking into the future, are there any projects that you’re especially excited about that you might want to share with our listeners?

This year we do have a renewed focus, like I said, I’m really talking to our local audience. Here in Rochester we have a really great group of what we call influencers, local individuals who are really engaged in the local communities. From a PR standpoint, I plan to develop some programming to better work with them this year so that they can really have the perspective of someone who is a visitor to your community. I always talk about how growing up here, there were so many great benefits and assets that we have here that I wasn’t even really aware of. I’m just growing up in the suburbs and there was just so many things happening downtown and really throughout the whole region that I had no idea about. I have kind of taken it on myself in this role to really help open up the eyes of locals to just all of what we have to see and do here. So, partnering with local influencers and turning them into our ambassadors for Visit Rochester and the tourism industry here is one of the goals that I’m working on this year.

Then we do have a unique opportunity to work with two different travel media marketplace events that are going to be taking place around the region. One that’s kind of neat is the travel blogger exchange, which brings together literally hundreds of travel bloggers. They’re going to be having their annual conference down in Corning in the southern part of the Finger Lakes, and we are so excited to work with the organization and our tourism partners in the Finger Lakes to develop some cool programming and some really interesting ways to show people all that Rochester has to see and do. We’re really just about an hour, ninety minute drive to where the exit is to the southern Finger Lakes so we’re going to be developing some creative and fun ways to engage all those folks that are going to be visiting. A lot of them are going to be flying in to Rochester.

Again, going back to what makes Rochester kind of unique and how we stand out from the crowd, we are the front door to the Finger Lakes. So if they will be flying into Rochester and coming through Rochester, well then here take a few minutes or few hours or days really out of your trip and let us show you all there is to see and do here in addition to the incredible beauty of the Finger Lakes. Those are just a handful of things that we will be working on, and really we’ll be working to continue to host travel writers and working more with bloggers and with those core areas of focus for family travel and arts and culture and food and drink and outdoors and history so it’s going to be a busy year, but we’re so excited and again I just feel so grateful to do what I do and to play my own small part in helping my community.

That’s great, and that sounds exciting. I like how you’ve taken this whole idea of influencers and are applying it to your local strategy as well. I know there’s a lot of discussion and a lot of outreach and focus on influencers in general as part of a PR and communications strategy, but to take that and think about how you can apply it to your local audience I think is really cool. I’d love to hear from you at the end of this year and see how that went, that sounds awesome!

Yeah. What’s really neat is that we have a group of influencers that are professional. They work with major brands, they have audiences all over and they happen to be based here in Rochester, so we have the really unique opportunity to work with that group of folks and just make sure we’re arming them and equipping them with the right information and just helping them see really all that their own community has to offer, and at the same time we’re kind of we’re reaching both their local audience as well as the audience outside of the area. So it should be good!

[bctt tweet=”“We have the opportunity to work with local influencers to help them see what their own community has to offer. Then we reach both their local audience as well as the audience outside of Rochester.” – @rachellaber #WhyCollaborate #podcast”]

Yeah. It’ll be fun!

Regions Have Strength in Numbers

Well I’d like to talk a little bit more about collaboration and as I’d mentioned it’s hard not to talk about collaboration when you’re talking about travel and tourism, and you’ve already talked about it and touched on it so much, especially the Visitor Industry Council, which is just a great example of that.

What I think is so cool about the travel and tourism industry is how competitors, conceived competitors, can come together and actually cooperate to create programs that are bigger than ones that they might be able to accomplish on their own. I’m wondering if you can describe for us, a time when a collaboration of that nature has worked for you in Visit Rochester?

Sure, I have the benefit and the opportunity to collaborate with my partners in the broader Finger Lakes region on, it feels like an almost daily basis. As I referenced before, Rochester is the front door to the Finger Lakes and we collaborate with 14 other counties in the Finger Lakes region as part of the Finger Lakes Regional Tourism Council and doing so counties as far as we’ve got Rochester on the west, Syracuse on the east all the way down to Ithaca and Corning and up by Wayne County and the lake and really just a wide-ranging geographic area, we all work together to attract specifically through our PR program to attract media coverage of the Finger Lakes region. That opportunity to be a coopatition with our fellow CPAs and destinations in the Finger Lakes region has been such a benefit because as we referenced with this Corning example, we have the benefit of having Rochester Greater National Airport and just being the third largest city in New York State, we have the benefit of being just a convenient touch point for visitors to the broader region.

So by partnering with others in the Finger Lakes region, we can take a visitor who perhaps their primary interest is the more traditional wine side of things and we can say to them, hey in addition to the wine if you stop in Rochester here are all the great things that you can see and do and spend the night. We’ve got 8000 hotel rooms here in the community so we can find a place for you to stay. So partnering with the rest of the region especially through the public relations program has been a really huge benefit, because we always say “Visitors don’t see county lines” so that shouldn’t preclude us from partnering and working together as a broader region.

[bctt tweet=”“Partnering with the Finger Lakes region has been a really huge benefit. We always say, ‘Visitors don’t see county lines,’ so that shouldn’t preclude us from working together as a broader region.” – @rachellaber #WhyCollaborate #podcast”]

I agree so much, visitors don’t know where one county stops and the next county starts and so I definitely see that as a great advantage.

I also know that last year’s speaking of PR, Rochester brought in a pretty large conference of your own. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know that it, that also involved reaching out and working with all kinds of different partners to pull that off.

Yes, gladly! In 2017, Rochester hosted the Macaroni Kid Silver Daisy Boondoggle, which is a lot of words but what it boiled down to was, a Macaroni Kid is a national network of hyper local newsletters, and silver daisies are basically the crème of the crop if you will. It’s those publishers that have garnered the largest audience and have the most engaged readership. And the boondoggle is the annual familiarization trip that they take to a different destination, so break that all down. We welcomed 50 of the top contributors to the Macaroni Kid Network to Rochester this past July 2017, and to welcome 50 writers who are going to be sharing and taking photos and writing about every minute of their experience, takes a lot of planning.

We had them for three nights and four days, and so we from the get-go came to our partners in the Finger Lakes and said, hey we’ve got a great opportunity, we’re bringing these folks here. They’re already going to be in Rochester, how can we show them even more of the region. How can we show them that it’s worth it for their readers to plan not just a long weekend but maybe even a week-long vacation in our part of New York State?

So, from the get-go, we got out ahead of it and connected with our different partners and said how can we all work together to make this the very best possible experience? Because from a communications standpoint, there is definitely strength in numbers and so we engaged our partners and through our attendees, the Macaroni publishers had four very fun-filled days in Rochester, but then many of them continued on for pre and post tours throughout the region.

We also hosted a taste of the Finger Lakes event at Casa Largo Winery here in Rochester. We were able to bring the Finger Lakes to our attendees and give them some great food and wine and samples of just all the things that are so special about the Finger Lakes. Our proximity to the broader region only makes us stronger as a destination, so it’s something that we really just embrace.

Yeah, I think that’s just a great example of how a number of destinations can come together to make it just a much better and fulfilling experience for everyone and I’m wondering Rachel through that experience, if you can share with our listeners, any lessons learned in terms of working with partners and kind of managing expectations and any kind of lessons learned or best practices that you can share?

Absolutely. I think when you’re working with multiple partners, the best thing you can do — and it sounds so simple — is communicate, communicate, communicate. Whether that’s clearly assigning roles or responsibilities, setting forth as a group coming to a conclusion of what does success look like because once you get into the process, once if you’re from an event perspective for example, once you’re planning things and you’re in the nitty gritty, it can be hard to take a step back and say, it’s changed course in the middle of it. So to have clear goals and a clear understanding of what success looks like from the get-go, and then also appropriately assigning who’s on first and then who’s doing this, and then all understanding how we’re all going to work together to make something happen, it’s just so important to have those open lines of communication.

[bctt tweet=”“When you’re working with multiple partners, the best thing you can do is communicate, communicate, communicate.” – @rachellaber #WhyCollaborate #podcast”]

I think also to understand you know sometimes to have a designated point person that can kind of take the lead and guide others because I love the saying, too many cooks in the kitchen, and so especially as I referenced for the Finger Lakes event, there was 14 different partners that were contributing to this event. So to have a few single, people, individuals that could take the leading role and help kind of corral everyone and keep everyone on track was critical to that success and especially as I was personally working on the rest of the experience the rest of the itinerary when we had those bloggers. It was a lot of moving pieces but without clear communication and constant check-ins with all the different partners to let people know what the progress was, what the status was, it would have been a lot more difficult, so we were able to use clear communication and have five more partners to result in a really successful event that I think, I like to think exceeded everyone’s expectations.

I think that’s a really great piece of advice. It does sound simple, communicate, communicate, communicate but I think it’s important to constantly remind ourselves that we need to communicate and you might have something thought through all the way in your own head, but if you don’t get that out and share it with our partners then they don’t have the same framework so, as you said you just gave us some really good guidance, by establishing clear goals, understanding what success looks like, getting buy in from partners and then the whole idea of having those designated point people identified, those decision makers identified in advance. I think that’s just really awesome advice.

So, Rachel, I knew this would be an awesome conversation and I’m sure we could keep talking for a very long time, but I am conscious of your schedule and my schedule and our listeners’ time as well so, we do need to wrap up this conversation. But before we end are there any last words that you would like to share with our listeners or anything that I didn’t ask you that you wanted to talk about?

Well, of course, I encourage all of your listeners to visit Rochester, visitrochester.com for all your trip planning needs, that’s my shameless plug and promotion. But no, I think that the tourism industry is, I’ve only been in it now for two years, but it is unlike anything else, any other industry that I’ve ever worked in and the people that you meet and all the different destinations and organizations that we represent, we’re all really in it together and at the end of the day, as I said I really do feel just so lucky to be able to contribute to my community and to know that in my own small way I’m helping to better the community that really I love so much. So I’m grateful for the opportunity and I thank you for the chance to speak on your program today and again, shameless plug visit Rochester, four seasons of fun.

Absolutely! Well thank you so much Rachel and I look forward to talking to you again.

Ways to contact Rachel:

• Website: www.visitrochester.com

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