Post by marcus on Sept 14, 2010 20:19:34 GMT -5
The Richmond Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau (RMCVB), which is funded in part by hotel taxes, is promoting an initiative by local businesses to attract homosexuals to Virginia’s capital.
The “Rainbow Over Richmond” campaign launched on Aug. 29 as a landing page on the RMCVB’s Web site.
According to the RMCVB Web site, the organization’s “primary funding” comes from a tax that hotel guests pay for lodging in five localities that make up the Richmond region – a transient lodging tax. “The RMCVB receives 1.75 percent of the transient lodging sales in the Richmond region,” states the Web site.
Jay White, spokesman for the ad hoc group of Richmond area businesses that conceived the Rainbow Over Richmond tourism campaign, said the group paid for it by sponsoring the Web page and other advertising venues in order to bring in some of the $55 billion that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals reportedly spend on domestic travel and tourism each year.
“This is just an initiative that a group of local business owners, representatives from various museums and attractions and I put together over the last year, year and a half,” White told CNSNews.com. “We’ve looked at declining occupancy rates; we’ve looked at declining income at the various attractions around Richmond and thought, ‘How can we get an influx of funds?’”
White said that the idea is modeled on the same kind of campaigns to attract the LGBT community -- and the travel dollars they spend -- to Virginia’s capital