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Destination Dallas:

  • More than 27 million people visit the Dallas/Fort Worth Area each year.
  • Leisure and business visitors have made Dallas the No. 1 destination in Texas.
  • Visitors spend more than $8 billion each year in Dallas, creating an economic impact of more than $11 billion. This “discovered” money makes restaurants, hotels, stores and retail flourish.
  • You can join the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau and receive a listing on our website, which will reach millions of visitors for about the cost of a newspaper advertisement for one week.
  • Unlike advertisements, membership in the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau gives you additional tools to be proactive: networking events, workshops, research and regularly updated convention calendars.
  • The Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau sells Dallas. No other organization markets Dallas at regional, national and international trade shows. We also work with travel and consumer magazines and average 25 contacts from national and international radio, TV, magazines and newspapers per day.
  • While other magazines and guides target Dallas visitors, your membership investment with the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau helps bring more visitors to our city.
    Our motto could be “If it is to be, it is up to us.” Our member businesses are community ambassadors, highlighting an incredible variety of cultures, fashions and tastes. Dallas is widely admired for its success with visitors, and the Convention & Visitors Bureau works hard year-round to bring visitors to Dallas.
  • The visitor and hospitality industries are growing. Nearly 100,000 people are employed in this sector.
  • You can consider the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau an extension of your own staff. Whether you employ one or 100, you can benefit from our expertise.

Arts and Culture:

  • $13 billion is currently being spent in urban developments.
  • More than 300 public art works are scattered throughout the city.
  • The nation’s largest collection of 1930s Art Deco exposition style architecture is in Fair Park.
  • Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Dallas Theater Center, the only freestanding theater built to his design that is still operating today.
  • More than 30 museums ranging from art, baseball and sewing machines to railroading and more, can be found in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.
  • The $81.5 million Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, designed by the famous architect I.M. Pei, houses the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the last handmade Fisk organ actually to be worked on by Mr. Fisk before he died (Opus 100).
  • The African American Museum in Dallas has one of the largest collections of African-American folk art in the nation.
  • The Dallas Children’s Theater was named one of the top five theaters in the U.S. Performances are held for young audiences and families.
  • The Dallas Museum of Art has the second-largest program for schoolchildren among art museums nationwide and is home to one of the largest collections of post-1945 art in the country.
  • The Dallas Public Library in downtown Dallas permanently displays one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, printed on July 4, 1776, and the First Folio of William Shakespeare’s “Comedies, Histories & Tragedies.”
  • The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area has more aviation museums than Washington D.C. does.
  • Dallas Film Society Film Festival entertains more than 30,000 attendees with more than 200 screenings, lectures and galas.
  • The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University has the most significant collection of Spanish art outside of Spain, featuring art from the 10th through 20th centuries.
  • The Crow Collection of Asian Art is the only Asian art museum in the Southwest.
  • The Dallas Arts District will have more buildings designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects in one location than anywhere else in the world.

Food & Spirits:

  • “There aren’t enough superlatives” to describe The French Room at the Adolphus Hotel, Zagat Survey said of the restaurant that it ranked as the No. 1 restaurant in the U.S. in 2006.
  • According to the Texas Restaurant Association, the Dallas area has more than 6,000 restaurants to enjoy.
  • Dallas’ Farmers Market is the largest working farmer’s market in the United States, with more than 1 million visitors annually.
  • One of the largest wine festivals in the Southwest is Grapefest, held in Grapevine, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas.

On the Air:

  • CBS’ “Walker: Texas Ranger” and Fox’s “Prison Break” were filmed in Dallas.
  • KERA-TV PBS Channel 13 Dallas is one of the most watched PBS stations in the United States and was the first PBS station in the country to air British comedies.
  • Movies “Leap of Faith,” “Pure Country,” “Ruby,” “JFK,” “Creepshow,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “Robocop,” “The Karate Kid” and the Oscar-winning “Silkwood” were all filmed in Dallas County.
  • The television series “Dallas” featured the Dallas area for 13 years and was shown in 95 foreign countries. Southfork Ranch still operates a short distance outside of the city.

Travel and Hospitality:

  • Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport offers 36 international and 134 domestic nonstop locations served daily by 60 flights. International flights have increased 69 percent in the past four years.
  • Less than a four-hour flight from major cities in the three nations of Canada, Mexico and the United States; no other city offers that convenience!
  • Dallas is the third-most-popular domestic business travel destination in America.
  • Dallas’ Love Field Airport is home base for Southwest Airlines, the nation’s least-complained-about airline for six years.
  • Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek is the only hotel in Texas with a Mobil Five-Star and AAA Five-Diamond rating for both the hotel facility and restaurant.
  • Dallas-area hotels provide visitors with a wide diversity of lodging options and more than 70,000 hotel rooms.
  • Metropolitan Dallas has more hotels than New York City.
  • One in 10 Dallas-area workers is employed by the hospitality industry.
  • Texas ranks second behind California as a pleasure travel destination for U.S. residents.
  • The Dallas area annually receives $7.4 billion dollars from visitors - 25.4 percent of the total for the entire state of Texas.
  • The Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau operates at no cost to Dallas taxpayers.
  • D/FW International Airport, larger than the island of Manhattan, is one of the busiest airports in the world with some 1,900 flights per day.
  • The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the No. 1 visitor and leisure destination in Texas.
  • Top two airlines for quality of service are both headquartered in the Dallas area - American Airlines at D/FW International Airport, and Southwest Airlines at Love Field Airport.
  • There are 122,000 jobs in the Dallas metro area related to the hospitality industry, representing more local jobs than American Airlines’ AMR Corp, Texas Instruments, Dallas Public Schools, City of Dallas, U.S. Postal Service, Baylor Health Care System, EDS and the JCPenney Company, combined.

Conventions:

  • The 1-million-square-foot Dallas Convention Center has been rated “Top Management/Staff,” “Top Exhibit Space” and “Best Managed” by peer groups and users.
  • The Dallas Convention Center’s 2002 expansion brings the space to 1 million square feet–bigger than the MLB’s Ballpark at Arlington. It also created the world’s largest singular, column-free exhibit hall in the world, at 203,000 square feet.

Living in Dallas:

  • Highland Park Village, built in 1931, was the first planned shopping center, which features a unified architectural style and stores facing in toward an interior parking area.
  • Galleria Dallas offers more than 200 premier retail stores and is home to the country’s tallest Christmas tree.
  • One of the largest permanent flea markets in the country is housed at Trader’s Village in Grand Prairie, just outside of Dallas.
  • One of the 10 largest municipalities in the nation.
  • Public schoolchildren speak 70 native languages at home.
  • The Dallas area is the largest metropolitan area in the nation not on a navigable body of water.
  • The Munger Place neighborhood, located in East Dallas, represents the largest concentration of Prairie-style homes in the nation.
  • The DART rail system is one of the nation’s fastest growing light rail lines.
  • The water supply plan developed by Dallas water utilities ensures that citizens will have sufficient water supply through 2050.
  • Wilburn D. Cook, designer of Beverly Hills, California, developed the suburb of Highland Park.

Other firsts, bests and notables:

  • InfoMart is housed in a unique building designed to resemble London’s Crystal Palace, built in 1851 for the first World’s Fair and International Technology Exhibition.
  • City Hall was designed by Pritzker-Prize winning architect I.M. Pei and features an outdoor sculpture by Henry Moore.
  • The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center employs eight of the nine Texas medical members in the
  • National Academy of Sciences, three recent Nobel Laureates and 13 of the most-cited scientists in the world.
  • The integrated circuit computer chip was invented in 1958 in Dallas.
  • Love Field’s Antique Mall is the largest antique and classic car mall in the United States.
  • Texas is larger than France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Luxembourg combined.
  • The “Texas Star” Ferris wheel at the State Fair of Texas is the tallest in North America.
  • The “welcome” statue at the Dallas Zoo is the tallest statue in Texas, soaring 67.5 feet tall. Naturally, it’s a giraffe!
  • The 52-foot “Big Tex” statue that greets visitors at the annual State Fair of Texas is the tallest cowboy in Texas.
  • The Children’s Center at the Dallas Public Library in downtown Dallas is the largest in the country.
  • The Dallas Arboretum holds the Southwest’s largest annual outdoor floral festival.
  • Dallas Convention Center is the only one in the nation to house an art museum on-site.
  • Parkland Hospital System is the second-largest birthing center in the nation, with more than 16,500 arrivals annually.
  • The Dallas World Aquarium is home to the 255,000 freshwater aquarium
  • The Gilbert House, located in the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch, is the oldest rock structure in Northeast Texas and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
  • The Johnson Central Library, located in downtown, is the largest library in the United States and houses one of the largest genealogical collections in the nation.
  • The largest model train display in America is in the lobby of the Children’s Medical Center.
  • The McKinney Avenue Trolley, which operates daily, is the largest volunteer-run trolley system in the world.
  • The Six Flags Over Texas is the largest theme park in the Southwest
  • The State Fair of Texas has been held annually at the same location in Fair Park since 1886.
  • The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas - a medical school and research university for graduate-level science adjacent, to Parkland Hospital - is home to four Nobel Laureates: three in physiology/medicine and one in chemistry.
  • The world’s largest bronze monument, standing at the Dallas Convention Center, has more than 40 larger-than-life longhorn steers, horses and cowboys in a Texas cattle drive.
  • Neiman Marcus began in Dallas, and its flagship store continues to thrive downtown.
  • At 5.5 million square feet, the Dallas Market Center is the world’s largest market for wholesale merchandise.

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