Experience Columbus

I’ve been to this visitor center to pick up tees for both the coffee and beer tours. Great place to find out more about our city! They have tons of brochures for places and they also had events here occasionally. I brought my cousins to see some zoo animals they had visiting one day. The staff of always helpful and friendly!

Harrison House Bed and Breakfast is a business member of Experience Columbus. I want to thank Fran for going above and beyond the call of duty to help me today! I have a guest from Germany, who forgot his international adapter… I talked to Fran and together we found several places in town to purchase. I was planning to take my guest shopping later today… Fran called back and found a friend with an adapter… who graciously allowed us to borrow it for the duration of my guest’s visit! WOW!!! What great service from our wonderful Visitor Center! Thanks Fran and Experience Columbus!!! Cheers! Lynn

A city is only as good as it’s marketing makes it look… lie. BUT, If that were true, Columbus would be really grateful for a rockin’ organization like Experience Columbus to make it a top-​tier destination for outsiders. :)
I’m gonna be honest, I’m a Columbus native and I didn’t even know about EC until a few years ago… GASP. Maybe you haven’t either?
Well, here’s what you need to know:
–it is the Greater Columbus Convention & Visitors Bureau
–it employs around 40 people
–it’s responsibility and purpose is to get people to Columbus and «create, sell and market a customized Columbus Experience»
–they have an awesome comprehensive event calendar
–more than 900 paying members invest on the efforts of EC to market the hell out of Columbus
Tip: they are all over the social media scene… and I loves that!

Once a tour guide, always a tour guide. I got my Washington, DC tour guide license back in 2001 and have spent the years since helping people plan their trips there. I love it! There is something so satisfying about helping people discover a city. If Columbus offered a tour guide license, you’d better bet I’d be the 1^st in line to get it!!! But they don’t so I rely on Experience Columbus to let me know what’s going on around town and set me up with deals at local businesses.
If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, go here (
), and even better, click the Free button and it will give you a list of the free events going on in Columbus. Wanna go on a Segway Tour of Columbus, go here (
) and get a coupon for $ 5 off!
I use their website more often than actually going to their office, but you can still pick up their visitors guide at Easton (inside the station) and check out all their suggestions for fun, cool things to do in the city and some nice day trips if you’re ready for a break!

Experience Columbus rocks. If you drop by the visitor center on Nationwide, I guarantee you’ll be greeted by the perkiest crew you’ve ever met. They’re so damn enthusiastic that it almost makes you stomach turn. They do their job very well. They can answer any question, and they give great tips. They’re accommodating for groups. They are persuasive enough to convince large groups to come to Columbus, and once those groups are here, the Experience Columbus team is clever enough to find ways to make them want to come back. They sell our city to people who have the money to travel and to spend, and that means that they keep us all afloat.
The visitor’s center is chock full of brochures from every Columbus attraction you can think of. There are maps adhered to the far wall of the center, and there is a video constantly streaming above.
The Experience Columbus visitor’s guide is great too. It’s the official guide to Columbus. It has info about public transportation, events, and attractions with lots of maps. The pictures are vibrant and full of life. Even the ads are informative. As a Columbus resident, I even use the guide to find out what’s happening in my city or to uncover great places that I haven’t heard of. The guide is the size of a normal magazine, and sometimes I wish it was smaller so I could just stuff it in my purse and go, but I’m not sure the energy would translate into a smaller size publication.

Well, I read a review in a magazine recently (I THINK it was Columbus CEO or Business First) in which Experience Columbus was set to reveal a new marketing plan to drive business into Columbus as conventions and travel to the area in general is down roughly 30%. However, as I was reading it, I was thinking to myself, this is STUPID. This new plan is SO RIDICULOUSLY patronizing– about the city we live in! I was livid!
There was a mention of it being sarcastically humorous… while I consider myself ‘sarcastically humorous’, I have to say nothing about the new plan sounded either. It was just crazy. I am desperately trying to find this article so I can post the link for you all. If anyone has read the same thing, please let me know… did I just mis-​read or what’s going on. If I am right about this, then I am so upset at Experience Columbus. What in the world are they getting paid to do exactly!!!