What it means
Experience Scottsdale is the tourism bureau, and in a city that lives on tourism that makes it a quiet power. It is the private nonprofit that buys the ads in Chicago and Minneapolis every January, courts the meeting planners who fill the resorts’ ballrooms, hosts the travel writers, runs the visitor center and the official visitor website, and reports to the City Council once a year on how many hotel nights its work produced. It is paid for by the city’s hotel guests, through the bed tax, and it spends about ten million of their dollars a year.
Locals of a certain tenure still call it the CVB, for Convention & Visitors Bureau, the name it carried for thirty years. Hoteliers and restaurateurs call it “Experience” and mean the membership organization they pay dues to. Council candidates call it “the destination marketing contract” and argue about whether the money is well spent. The Chamber of Commerce, from which it was spun off in 2001, is a different organization now, and the site’s guide to the Chamber tells the story of the divorce from the Chamber’s side.
Where you’ll meet it
In the “Absolutely Scottsdale” and later campaigns on airport walls and in travel magazines; at the visitor center in Old Town; on experiencescottsdale.com, which most visitors land on first; and in the city budget, under the Tourism Development Fund, where the budget guide explains the bed tax split.
Where the word came from
The function is older than the name by decades. Scottsdale’s merchants organized the Chamber of Commerce in 1947 to sell the town to winter visitors, invented the West’s Most Western Town slogan and, once the city began collecting a hotel bed tax, spent the city’s tourism money as the city’s agent. Inside the Chamber a convention and visitors bureau division did the work. When that division began is disputed: a 2017 city report says 1977, Experience Scottsdale’s own history says 1987, and the Chamber’s historian writes that the bureau spent “over 50 years” inside the Chamber. We report the disagreement rather than pick a year.
The split came in 2001. A private membership club spending a public tax had become awkward, and the bureau had become the Chamber’s largest program. The division was reorganized as a separate nonprofit, the Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau, and the city signed a destination marketing contract with it directly; the city auditor’s reports date the city’s relationship with the bureau from that year. The Chamber lost its biggest funding stream in one stroke and rebuilt itself as a dues-and-events business association.
The name changed in 2016. After an 18-month review of what other destination organizations called themselves, the board dropped “Convention & Visitors Bureau,” a label the industry had come to regard as bureaucratic, and chose Experience Scottsdale, launching experiencescottsdale.com at the same time. The trend was national: Visit this, Discover that, Experience the other. Scottsdale’s choice was the verb.
What it is not
Experience Scottsdale is not a city department. The city’s Tourism and Events Department administers the contract and funds events separately; the bureau is its contractor. It is not the Chamber of Commerce, though they were once one body and still share members. And it is not Visit Phoenix, the regional bureau, with which it competes politely for the same conventions.
The fine print
The money mechanism is specific and worth knowing. Scottsdale levies a 5 percent transient occupancy tax, the bed tax, on hotels and other lodging. Voters dedicated 50 percent of it to destination marketing, with the rest going to tourism-related capital projects, events and the like under city ordinance and state law. The destination marketing half is paid to Experience Scottsdale under a five-year contract, most recently effective July 1, 2017, through June 30, 2022, and renewed since; payments ran from $9.1 million to $11.4 million a year in fiscal 2017-18 through 2020-21, after about $9.4 million in 2015-16; the figures come from the city auditor’s 2016 and January 2022 contract audits. The city also pays half the cost of the bureau’s separate Fiesta Bowl arrangement, a 20-year deal signed in 2006 that keeps both bowl teams in hotels paying Scottsdale or Paradise Valley bed tax.
The bureau’s other income is smaller: a Town of Paradise Valley contract, a Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community program, and dues from its business members, who are the hotels, restaurants, golf courses and attractions that want to be in the brochures. The 2022 audit flagged that the contract let the organization commingle its city funding with the rest, that its net assets had grown by almost $2.6 million in a year of pandemic-reduced spending, and that marketing effectiveness was not being measured regularly. The auditor recommended a full accounting of bed-tax money and stronger fiscal monitoring; the council’s response is in the record, and the argument recurs whenever the contract is renewed.
The gap in the record is the bureau’s early history inside the Chamber, where no founding document for the division has been published.