Carl Pierre on how Alexandria, Virginia hit $1 billion in visitor spending, and what a market that refuses to be DC's overflow teaches marketers.
Alexandria, Virginia crossed $1 billion in annual visitor spending for the first time in its history, and it did that sitting minutes down the Potomac from the most visited capital city in the country. I am Carl Pierre, a performance marketing strategist in the Washington DC metro who buys paid media for luxury hotels, and this is the most useful number in the region. Alexandria's visitor spending rose 8% in calendar year 2024, outpacing both Northern Virginia and the Commonwealth as a whole, according to Visit Alexandria. Markets that sit next to a much bigger market are supposed to grow slower than it. This one grew faster, and the reason is a positioning decision most secondary markets never make.
The default play for a destination beside a famous one is to sell proximity and price. Same trip, less money, short drive. It looks like the responsible choice because it is the easy sell, and it is the single most expensive mistake in destination marketing, because it concedes the reason for the trip to the neighbor and leaves you competing on margin alone. Hotels do the identical thing at the property level. Any hotel whose first line is "fifteen minutes from the convention center" has told you it could not think of a reason a guest would want to be there specifically.
Alexandria has every geographic excuse to run that play and does not. It sells reasons Washington cannot offer. The city was founded in 1749 and holds the nation's third oldest historic district. Old Town's King Street mile carries more than 200 independent restaurants and boutiques running down to a working waterfront. None of that is a discount on a DC trip. It is a different trip, taken for its own reasons, and that distinction shows up directly in the revenue.
It matters commercially because the two positions attract structurally different demand. Overflow demand is price-elastic, arrives through the cheapest channel available, and evaporates the week the primary market has rooms again. Destination demand searches for you by name, books direct at a rate the overflow segment never matches, and returns. One of those is a business. The other is a hedge against someone else's sold-out weekend.
Travel + Leisure named Alexandria one of the top five cities in the United States in 2025. Condé Nast Traveler has named it a best small city in the country for seven consecutive years. Most marketers file this under press and move on, which wastes it. Both lists are driven by traveler surveys rather than editor picks, which makes them a repeated read on whether people who actually went would send someone else.
One appearance is noise. Any destination can catch a good year, a favorable news cycle, or a well-timed campaign. Seven consecutive years is a system holding under different conditions, different economies, and different leadership. When I evaluate whether a property's performance is real or borrowed, I am asking that same question in a smaller frame: does this hold when nothing is going its way? Alexandria has now answered it seven times in a row on the record, and that consistency is worth more as evidence than any single ranking is as publicity.
The practical use of a signal like that is as a control. Paid media can move almost any short-term number, which makes short-term numbers a poor read on whether the underlying product improved. A multi-year traveler-voted result is one of the few measures a marketing budget cannot buy its way into, so when it moves, something real moved with it. I hold hotel campaigns to the same standard by pairing whatever the media plan delivered against a metric the media plan cannot touch. If the two ever diverge for more than a quarter, the campaign is working and the property is not.
Visit Alexandria reports Fiscal Year 2025 consumption tax revenues of $88 million from sales, meals, and lodging, up from $86 million the prior year, supporting more than 5,700 jobs and saving the average Alexandria household an estimated $832 a year. That last figure is the most strategically interesting thing a destination marketing organization can publish, and almost none of them do.
Here is why it matters. Every hospitality business has an internal audience that can quietly decide how well the marketing works. For a city it is residents. For a hotel it is the staff, the ownership group, and the neighborhood the property sits in. When that audience experiences visitors purely as congestion, the operating reality starts contradicting the brand promise, and guests feel it long before it reaches a report. Publishing a per-household dollar figure reframes the whole equation. It gives a resident a reason to want the visitor there.
I learned to take this seriously running coworking space in Washington DC, work Northern Virginia Magazine covered when it looked at how the region was changing the way it worked. A coworking floor lives or dies on whether existing members want new ones to show up. Sell past that point and the product degrades even as the occupancy chart improves. Cities run the same equation at scale, and the ones that publish the arithmetic honestly tend to be the ones that have done it honestly.
Four checks, usable on a hotel or a city:
The shift worth making is to stop treating a secondary market as a cheaper version of the primary one and start treating it as a destination with its own reason to exist. Alexandria did that, and it turned proximity to Washington DC into an advantage instead of a ceiling. A billion dollars in visitor spending, growing faster than the rest of Virginia around it, is what that decision is worth when it holds for long enough.
This is the same bet at every scale. A city, a hotel, a neighborhood, or a brand can compete on being near the thing people want, or it can be the thing people want. The first is easier to start and impossible to defend. I write more about Alexandria, Virginia, and marketing across the DMV in DC Tech and the DMV, including my broader take on what Alexandria gets right that bigger cities keep getting wrong. See my background and selected press coverage.
Carl Pierre is a performance marketing strategist based in the Washington DC metro area. He ran three of the city's WeWork coworking spaces before moving into hospitality marketing, and his work has appeared in Washingtonian, on WAMU, and in Northern Virginia Magazine. More at carlpierre.com.
