2025 Recap from the February 25 Annual Meet Minneapolis Event
Thursday, February 26, 2026 at 11:10AM
Credit: Coppersmith Photography
At its Annual Meeting on February 25, Meet Minneapolis reported 2025 performance results, significant progress on long-term strategy and major investments designed to strengthen the city’s visitor economy. Amid recent challenges that have required care and collective resolve, the organization emphasized its continued focus on securing future meetings, conventions and events which supports more than 31,000 tourism and hospitality workers and delivers meaningful economic impact for the city.
Meet Minneapolis Key Performance Indicators for 2025*
Tourism in Minneapolis directly supports hundreds of businesses and tens of thousands of workers – individuals whose livelihoods are built on the city’s ability to attract visitors and events. In 2025, Meet Minneapolis and its partners:
- Brought more than 650 events to the city and region
- Welcomed nearly 660,000 people to the Minneapolis Convention Center
- Filled more than two million hotel rooms for the second consecutive year
Per Melvin Tennant, President and CEO of Meet Minneapolis, “We are seeing the results of strong collaboration across our tourism and hospitality community. Tourism is an economic engine for Minneapolis. Every meeting we book, every convention we host and every event we attract sustains jobs and local businesses and generates critical tax revenue. Our focus is clear – increase visitation, support workers and keep Minneapolis competitive in an evolving meetings and travel landscape.”
Launch of the Minneapolis Tourism Improvement District
In June 2025, the local hotel community and city leadership, in partnership with Meet Minneapolis, established the Minneapolis Tourism Improvement District (MTID). The MTID is expected to generate approximately $7 million annually to support destination marketing, sales and event recruitment. In its first year, the MTID helped secure the Savannah Bananas for a high-profile Minneapolis stop and launched Winterapolis 2025-26, a targeted campaign designed to drive hotel room nights during the city’s slowest tourism season. This early momentum demonstrates how industry-led investment is strengthening the city’s ability to compete for meetings, conventions and major events while accelerating long-term growth.
Destination Master Plan Momentum: Minneapolis as the #1 City for Women’s Sports
Meet Minneapolis advanced a key priority from Destination Minneapolis: Charting the Future of Minneapolis Tourism, the city’s long-range tourism master plan aligning public, private and civic sectors around a shared vision. In October 2025, the organization launched Minneapolis: The #1 City for Women’s Sports, positioning the city as the leading U.S. destination for women’s sports based on decades of championship hosting, participation and competitive success. The initiative included a public announcement, a dedicated digital hub, a co-authored op-ed with Minnesota Sports & Events, and a stakeholder launch event.
Key Future Bookings
Meet Minneapolis secured more than 300 future events and conventions in 2025. Select future bookings:
- American Choral Directors Association National Conference (March 2027)
- United Methodist Church General Conference (May 2028)
- Northern Lights Junior Volleyball Qualifier (March 2029 & 2030)
- American Association of Immunologists Annual Meeting (May 2031)
- American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition (August 2031)
Marketing Agency of Record Search
Meet Minneapolis launched a Request for Proposals (RFP) to select a Marketing Agency of Record to lead a large-scale brand campaign launching in 2026. Supported by funding from the MTID, this effort represents a long-term investment in building a unified brand and demand marketing platform designed to inspire travel, attract meetings and conventions, and cultivate more ambassadors for Minneapolis. The RFP process is currently underway, with an agency partner expected to be selected later this spring.
More 2025 Highlights
- Best Week Ever for Minneapolis Hotels: On September 14-20, hotels in Minneapolis had their strongest week ever from a demand and room revenue standpoint, while also setting a new post-pandemic weekly occupancy record. The noteworthy hotel success was driven by many major events hosted throughout the city, including Farm Aid at Huntington Bank Stadium, and the North American Biochar Conference and World Workplace at the MCC.
- Community Events Assistance Program: The Minneapolis Community Events Assistance Program launched in 2025. Minneapolis CEAP supports Minneapolis-based nonprofit organizations with financial assistance to help cover city-mandated service costs for community-driven events that support community engagement, cultural diversity, and the promotion of public events that enrich the lives of its residents and visitors. In 2025, 23 events were supported which attracted a combined one million attendees.
- America’s Winter City: Winterapolis continued to serve as Meet Minneapolis’ signature winter leisure campaign in 2025, positioning Minneapolis as an inviting, active and culturally rich winter destination. The campaign was also adopted and amplified by a range of local partners, extending the reach of the messaging and reinforcing Winterapolis as a shared platform for celebrating and promoting winter experiences across the city.
- Cultural Districts Tourism: To highlight the city’s designated Cultural Districts, Meet Minneapolis expanded this work through the Get Drawn In campaign, a multi-channel awareness effort designed to spotlight the businesses, culture and creative energy within each district. Across all tactics, the campaign delivered 3.2 million impressions and 27,600 clicks, reinforcing awareness of the districts and their role in strengthening Minneapolis neighborhoods.
- Digital Engagement: The Meet Minneapolis website drew nearly three million sessions. There were also more than one million outbound clicks to partner websites. Social media channels generated more than 38 million impressions in 2025, and followers grew to more than 242,000 across all channels.
To access the 2025 Meet Minneapolis Annual Impact Report, please go here.
To address the challenges that Minneapolis has faced in the past few months, Meet Minneapolis launched the MPLS for MPLS marketing initiative to remind the local community and visitors of ways they can help support our local businesses and neighborhoods. More recently, the Go. Gift. Give. campaign was unveiled to encourage people outside Minneapolis (within driving distance) to support the city by coming in, buying gift cards and showing up for local businesses.
*Regarding the audit line of our news release, CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen) performs “agreed upon procedures” in testing results for our KPIs in Future Room Nights and Partnership Retention concurrent with a financial audit. Results are released at the same time and are presented to the Meet Minneapolis board in April. MCC Revenue and Lodging taxes are not tested as those numbers are provided by the City.
