Meetings and hospitality industry veteran Dean Miller, national sales manager for Visit Fairfax, who spent the last two decades in executive sales positions at the Northern Virginia DMO, is calling it a career after 35 years in the hospitality industry.
"After a hospitality sales career in Fairfax County that spanned 35 years—the last 20 with Visit Fairfax, the county’s award-winning DMO—Dean will be packing up all of his interesting neckties (where does he get them??) and his collection of B.B. King CDs, and riding off into the sunset of retirement," Miller joked, adding that he plans to keep contributing to the meetings and events industry through writing during retirement, as well as attending theater and traveling with his wife, Gwen.
"You’ll likely find him having coffee with friends at a diner or a doughnut shop somewhere in Virginia," he added.
Miller said he will stay with the DMO until the end of the year, or until a replacement is onboarded.
He began his career in Fairfax County hospitality industry sales at the Embassy Suites Tysons Corner in 1990 and also worked for Hyatt hotels and Hilton hotels in Fairfax County between 1990 and 2005. He began his job at Visit Fairfax in 2005 as the first salesperson hired in the DMO’s new configuration, helping establish the organization’s policies and procedures for sourcing leads, communicating with clients, conducting site inspections, exhibiting at tradeshows, hosting fam trips and tours for clients, and organizing internal sales data and procedures.
[Related: Virginia’s Fairfax County Emerges on the Meetings Scene]
Dean Miller Career Highlights
Miller’s career highlights at Visit Fairfax include:
- Dramatically increasing Fairfax County’s presence in the state association, national association and reunion markets.
- Conceiving and hosting an annual family-reunion workshop for 12 consecutive years through 2020, which was widely imitated by other DMOs.
- Writing a quarterly “Hospitality Answerman” column for Reunions magazine since 2011.
- Overseeing the transition of Visit Fairfax’s tradeshow presence from traditional “pipe-and-drape” shows to attendance at focused “hosted buyer” programs.
- Spearheading Visit Fairfax sales and marketing efforts to promote the openings of the Metrorail Silver line to Tysons Corner and Reston (2014), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), the National Museum of the United States Army (2020), Capital One Hall (2021), the Metrorail Silver line to Dulles Airport (2022) and the National Museum of the United Sates Navy (upcoming).
- Active in the Virginia Association of CVBs for more than a decade, serving on the group’s board of directors from 2008 until 2019, and as president from 2013 through 2015.
Aside from other contributions to the Fairfax County hospitality community, one other accomplishment that perfectly jibes with his personality: Miller assisted in having George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the National Museum of the Marine Corps featured as clue categories on Jeopardy!
