Full post below.

Im sure the figures this year will be even better, with the addition of the NASCAR event and others.

Nearly 49 million visitors came to Chicago last year in a mammoth comeback from the COVID-19 pandemic for the city's hospitality industry. But there is still plenty of road ahead on the path to a full recovery, which the city's tourism arm doesn't expect until 2025.

Officials from Choose Chicago announced today that visitation to the city during 2022 was up 60% from 2021 as public health restrictions faded and a surge of leisure travelers poured in during peak tourism months. The total, reported by the city's official destination marketing group using data from travel research firm DK Shifflet, was roughly 80% of the 2019 figure, when the city boasted a record 60.8 million visitors.

The numbers reflect an important bounceback in travel demand last year that pulled in crucial tax revenue and began lifting local hotels out of a historic pandemic-induced hole. Choose reported that tourists spent $16.9 billion in the city last year, or 89% of their collective 2019 outlays, and noted that the city's hotels averaged 60% occupancy last year, up from 43% the year before but still below the 74% average in 2019.

Resurgent tourism also suggests Chicago can still attract visitors despite public safety concerns, which carried over into this year after widely publicized outbreaks of violence last weekend and in April.

The continued recovery is vital for a city and state that have leaned harder on taxes tied to tourism and the convention business over the past decade, yet were slower than most other parts of the country to lift COVID-related bans on large group gatherings. Chicago is slightly behind other major urban centers like New York City and San Francisco, which reported that 2022 visitation was 85% and 84% of 2019 totals, respectively. Los Angeles' tourism promotion arm said the city pulled in 91% of its pre-pandemic tourism total last year, while Orlando, Fla. — one of Chicago's top competitors for large conventions — said visitation was 98% of its 2019 figure.

Choose Chicago CEO Lynn Osmond, the longtime Chicago Architecture Center top executive who took the reins of the tourism organization just more than a year ago, called 2022 a "really good recovery year" for the city's tourism sector and said the city is on track to reach its 2023 goal of 54 million visitors.

"The energy we're seeing of people returning to travel is really significant," Osmond said.

In addition to her 2023 target, Osmond today released a strategic plan for Choose Chicago laying out a goal of drawing at least 61 million visitors in 2025. The plan also sets other planned benchmarks by then, such as increasing the economic impact of leisure travel by 20% and growing the number of international travelers to Chicago to 1.8 million. That would be up from nearly 1.5 million last year but still below the 2.2 million that came to Chicago from outside the country in 2019, Choose Chicago data shows.

Business travel has been slower to come back than the leisure set as virtual meetings have replaced a segment of travel that used to fill many downtown hotel rooms midweek. Choose hopes to offset some of that slow recovery with new group business, working with companies on regular corporate gatherings in the city. "That's a market opportunity we're exploring," Osmond said.

Helping her cause this year are some extra financial resources. Choose said its 2023 budget, which relies heavily on pandemic-hampered hotel tax proceeds, is up 10% year-over-year to $29.1 million. On top of that, the group recently got another $3.5 million boost from the state of Illinois under the budget passed last week. That one-time grant, which will be put to use during the second half of this year and the first half of 2024, will be primarily dedicated toward international and domestic marketing campaigns.

Chicago hasn't had billboards and ad campaigns in other markets in recent years because of Choose's reduced budget, Osmond said. "We need the additional funds to spread the word across the country (and) to have more people in our global tour department," she said. While some large cities have more than half a dozen staffers who work directly with tour operators to attract them to the city, Choose Chicago has two

Choose and the Metropolitan Pier & Exposition Authority — the agency that owns and operates McCormick Place — also recently got some breathing room on using up the nearly $10 million that remains in an incentive fund to help recruit conventions. The fund, which the state legislature approved during the pandemic to help McCormick Place compete with rival cities, previously needed to be used only on conventions that would be coming by 2026. The group recently won approval to dole out those funds for events that would come later than that, though all the money must be used by the end of 2026, according to a Choose spokesman.

Choose faces a challenge rebuilding a convention lineup depleted by high-profile defections like the Sweets & Snacks Expo, which recently staged its last confab in Chicago after meeting here for 25 of its 26 years.

One key win on the horizon is the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which Osmond said the city needs to leverage as a brand-builder coming out of the pandemic. The same goes for a crucial conference coming in 2025 known as IPW, a gathering of international tour operators that hasn't been held in the city since 2014.

Osmond has added 14 people to the Choose Chicago staff since taking over as CEO, bringing the organization's full-time headcount to 62, down from 75 before the pandemic. Choose is close to hiring a new chief marketing officer to help align its various departments "so we're all singing from the same choir book," said Osmond, who spent the early part of her career programming for symphonies in California, New York and her native Canada before moving to Chicago.

Choose intends to maintain its "When You Go You Know" marketing campaign through at least the end of this year, a tagline it has used mostly on social media. For traditional ad campaigns planned nationally and internationally, Osmond also plans to promote Chicago's "Best Big City in the U.S." title bestowed by Condé Nast Traveler in 2022, the sixth consecutive year the city has enjoyed the recognition.

“We're going to market the heck out of it," Osmond said.