Surprise Launches Tourism Website

Published: Monday, March 4, 2019 - 5:05am
City of Surprise
A hiker reads about the history of White Tank Mountain Regional Park along one of the park’s trails.
City of Surprise
An aerial view of Surprise Stadium, the spring training home of the Kansas City Royals and Texas Rangers.

Just in time for spring training, Surprise unveils a new tourism website. The city hopes it will help baseball fans and others with money to spend.

Kendra Pettis, sports and tourism director for Surprise, said it’s the city’s first website devoted solely to tourism.

“Our biggest time for tourism in Surprise is right now during spring training,” she said. “We get about 200,000 fans each year that come to the stadium during that time frame. Sixty percent are typically from out-of-state.”

Pettis spends a lot of time working with tournament groups and event promoters and said the website will help pitch various venues in Surprise.

“As we go to some of those conferences, we can have that information on hand and say, ‘Oh, you’re looking for, you know, a baseball stadium. Well, here’s 12 fields. This is what our facility looks. Here’s the stadium. Here’s all the places we have available for meetings, for corporate outings, those types of things,’” she said.

There are pages focused on things to do, places to eat and where to spend the night. Plus, local businesses can submit events for the site’s calendar.

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