New MA Tourism Chief Kate Fox Reflects On Her 2 Decades In Salem

SALEM, MA — The Salem landscape that Kate Fox leaves to take on her new role as the Executive Director of The Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism is much different than the one she first stepped into as the city's tourism chief in 1998 and came back to after a short hiatus in 2008.

Back then, she remembers the Witch City as being mostly a summer town for visitors, with one of her missions to grow tourism beyond the waterfront from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

"We were always focused on extending the tourism season," she told Patch on Thursday. "Haunted Happenings was born as a way to extend tourism beyond the summer and as a program that will help attract visitors year-round."

Fifteen years later, there is a festival in the city each month, a thriving restaurant and small business scene downtown that caters as much to out-of-towners as it does residents, and of course, there is the Halloween phenomenon that attracted nearly 1 million visitors during October 2022 and now arguably lasts from the middle of September well into November.

"We were able to grow tourism and increase visitation, and that increases tax revenue and supports the business community," she said. "You had the increased interest in Halloween and October, some movies like 'Hocus Pocus' that got a lot of people interested in Salem. A lot of things happened simultaneously.

"It was a lot of synergy, a lot of hard work, and a little bit of good luck."

She said some of the first programs were akin to "throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck." Some tosses — such as Haunted Happenings, Holiday Happenings, Ancestry Days and the Arts Magic event that predated the Salem Arts Festival — were hits. Others, like the former antique festival, fell a bit flat over time — eventually being replaced with the very popular Salem So Sweet event each February.

"The more things we did the more we found that groups were coming to Salem because it was a vibrant community and they wanted to be a part of that," she said. "It takes a lot of time to do the successful programming that it takes to extend the season."

The Beverly resident will now try to take the successes and lessons learned from her two decades bringing people to the Witch City to the entire state. She began her new position on June 12.

"The opportunity to work for the Mass Office Travel & Tourism isn't something I could turn down," she said. "I am grateful the opportunity came at a time when the staff at Destination Salem is strong, and the (board of directors) is strong."

While she is still settling into her new position, she said some of the things she hopes to bring to the state from her time in Salem are the ability to market and advertise to both domestic and international audiences, use the office's website as a tool to attract visitors and enhance their stay so that they return, and provide better outreach via social media.

"At the end of the day it's all about collaboration," she said. "Now I've got 351 cities and towns and 16 regional tourism offices to collaborate with so it's a lot more than I've had on the local level."

Fox said that at no point during her time in Salem was that collaboration more important than starting in March 2020 with the COVID-19 shutdowns. In an industry built on bringing people together, she was among those who spearheaded the efforts to push people away from the Witch City during October 2020, while also trying to work with the businesses to help them navigate ever-evolving capacity restrictions, mask mandates and even a very short-lived COVID vaccination requirement for employees and visitors to non-essential public-facing businesses.

"The pandemic was horrible in so many ways," she said. "But it did inspire a lot of collaboration and cross-pollination. We did a lot of things to support the business community to the point where they survived the pandemic and are now thriving.

"But I never want to be in a position to tell people not to come to a city ever again."

As the pandemic waned, her focus in Salem turned away from the Halloween tourism that had become increasingly self-perpetuating to showcasing the city throughout the entire year when the crowds were less and the wild costumes were at least far fewer and farther between.

"I always love April in Salem," she said, "when the trolley first starts running and the weather is improving.

"That's when I always looked around and said: 'This is a great place to be.'"

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)