Travel Portland CEO on Acting Like a First-Tier Destination

Portland might not actually be a first-tier city in terms of population and urban infrastructure, but Travel Portland CEO Jeff Miller says the destination marketing organization acts like it anyway. Part of that includes developing the city's international visitor base. Portland is the smallest U.S. gateway with direct flights to Tokyo and Amsterdam, via Delta Air Lines. This year, it secured direct routes to Frankfurt aboard Condor Airlines and Reykjavik with Iceland Air. The DMO is projecting a 21 percent increase in international arrivals for 2015. Japan is especially enamored with Oregon. If you're using Google Chrome, for translating purposes, check out these media outlets in Tokyo with Portland travel stories: Popeye, Brutus, Delta Sky Japan and Sotokoto. According to Travel Portland, the city generated 194 placements in international media last year with a combined circulation of 178,963,423 and $6.1 million ad value. Portland is also contracting Airbnb to create destination guides with local neighborhood content supplied by Airbnb hosts, which will be translated into Japanese and distributed throughout Japan. Portland is one of the few cities where Airbnb charges a local occupancy tax, and because of that, it's more politically appropriate for the DMO to collaborate with the sharing platform than destinations that don't. “We're not a Las Vegas or Chicago, and we don't have their infrastructure, and we don't want that, but we look at how they promote themselves,” says Miller. “We're getting ready to do a huge activation in Japan because they love all things Portland. It's a very big investment, where we're talking about the authenticity of Portland, so we're acting like a first-tier destination. But I wouldn't say we're competing with them because we always want to be who were are. I think that's really, really important.” How do you put a dollar figure on the cool factor of a city and the ability of that to drive tourism, both leisure and group? Portland's groovy Northwest Pacific hipster appeal is why the Asians and Europeans want to visit. Likewise, Miller says Australia and New Zealand are "huge growing markets" as well. From a tourism standpoint, Portland is one of those emerging U.S. cities hitting abov