The sound of success: Visit Austin strikes the right chord with a strategic website redesign

Overview

Visit Austin needed a website that could support leisure travelers and meeting planners in Austin, Texas, during one of the largest infrastructure projects in its history. In response to the city preparing for a multi-year convention center redevelopment, the destination marketing organization (DMO) worked with Granicus Destinations to launch a fully redesigned website and meetings microsite. The project delivered significant growth across many digital fronts — including key meetings-related metrics — despite the challenging industry conditions.

SITUATION

Prepping for unprecedented change

Visit Austin's previous website had served the organization well since 2018, helping the destination navigate the pandemic and years of industry disruption. By 2024, however, the DMO faced new challenges. Austin was entering a period of massive infrastructure investment, including the four-year redevelopment of the Austin Convention Center, which would temporarily remove an estimated 400,000 room nights from the market each year until the new facility opens in 2029. “We were really going to have to lean heavily on the leisure tourism side of our business, but also show up in new, interesting, and refreshing ways for the meetings industry,” said Christine Felton, director of digital and content marketing for Visit Austin.

Visit Austin had completed its first major brand refresh in years and had begun to see shifts in organic traffic and search behavior. What initially started as a visual redesign quickly became a broader effort to strengthen content delivery, information architecture, technical performance, and user experience. “We needed to make sure that the Visit Austin brand was showing up in a way that was prepared to help support the city in one of our biggest times of need,” said Felton. “What we thought was going to be more of a visual and brand identity update really needed to be a structural and technical update as much as anything, if not more so.”
 

SOLUTION

Meeting people (and planners) where they’re at

Visit Austin leveraged its long-standing partnership with Granicus Destinations and its familiarity with Simpleview CMS to build a website that reflected the destination's personality while advancing measurable business goals. The project combined a full website redesign with a comprehensive content audit, sitemap restructuring, and accessibility enhancements from the Simpleview CMS + AudioEye integration.

The Creative Services experts from Granicus Destinations immersed themselves in the destination through an onsite Destination Immersion trip that helped the team better understand the character of Austin and the needs of its audience. “The Creative Services team brought us really thoughtful design elements that played off our history and our brand as the Live Music Capital of the World®,” said Felton. The resulting design introduced custom elements inspired by Austin's identity, including:

• Music-themed navigation cues
• A dynamic day-to-night homepage experience
• Live music event highlights
• A playfully illustrated map of iconic attractions

Accessibility was prioritized throughout the experience by incorporating ADA-compliant typography, color palettes, and design standards aligned with Visit Austin's refreshed brand. Visit Austin had a standing partnership with AudioEye and used its digital accessibility integration to ensure all site visitors can customize their browsing experience to meet their specific vision, hearing, motor, and cognitive abilities. “The design team was always thinking accessibility first, accessibility forward," explained Felton.

Another significant improvement to the website involved the meetings audience. Granicus Destinations helped transform a traditional meetings section into a dedicated meetings microsite with its own content strategy, navigation structure, and user journey. Felton recalled the experience as follows:

The new microsite gave meeting planners a more intuitive experience and better aligned the website with Visit Austin's long-term convention sales goals.
 

RESULTS

“An even better story than we expected to be able to tell”

The redesigned website launched during one of the most challenging digital environments DMOs have faced. Despite expectations that traffic might temporarily decline following launch, Visit Austin saw immediate gains.

Total users increased 13% year over year, while sessions increased 7%. The DMO also improved partner referrals and achieved metrics that outperformed industry averages in ways like:

• 55% engagement rate (+21% vs. the industry average).
• 00:50:00 engagement time (+67% vs. the industry average).
• 1.84 views per session (+10% vs. the industry average).
• 263,984 total AI retrievals, which ranked third among DMO websites during this period.

“Visitors are continuing to arrive on the site in healthy numbers — and when they get there, they're staying longer, they're exploring more, and they're engaging at a rate above many of our peer destinations,” said Felton.

The most dramatic results came from the newly created meetings microsite. Active users increased 181% year over year, sessions increased 136%, and request for proposal (RFP) page sessions grew by 200%. These gains reinforced Visit Austin's meetings strategy during a period when maintaining planner confidence was especially important. “It really speaks to the importance of catering to the meeting planner audience,” explained Felton. “I think they often get overlooked for the flashier leisure tourism audience, but they were so excited to be a part of that conversation.”

This powerful combination of improvements strengthened Visit Austin’s digital authority and visibility across AI-powered search platforms. It is now easier for AI systems to discover, understand, and cite trusted information — resulting in more AI-generated citations than any other Granicus Destinations client.

Internally, the website gave the team at Visit Austin greater confidence in its ability to communicate the destination's value, support partners, and guide travelers through Austin's next chapter. “The collaboration between our team and the Granicus Destinations team provided a level of openness and new ideas that set this project up for success,” reflected Felton. “Recommendations were always based in data, which is important to us; we looked to [Granicus Destinations] to be an extension of our team. In the end, I think the project became an even better story than we expected to be able to tell.”
 

BONUS

Hard work pays off in an award-winning way

Visit Austin’s new website just won the 2026 Skift IDEA Award for "Creative Design,” an accolade that recognizes the boldest, most innovative work defining the future of travel. According to Skift, “Winning in the Creative Thinkers category — which honors marketing, strategy, and technology that pushes the industry forward — signals to the global tourism community that Visit Austin is continuing to lead the way in digital innovation.”