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What's good for Buick is good for Detroit.
That may not apply all the time, but it definitely fits a win-win promotion the last few days by the GM division's media relations team. It flew a dozen high-traffic bloggers here from New York, California, Florida, Colorado, Iowa and elsewhere for a junket tagged #ExperienceBuick.
Jennifer Snyder, a Northern California writer and podcast host, tweets this downtown shot.
The independent writers and photographers cover lifestyle, travel, fashion and "trends." They stayed downtown Wednesday and Thursday at the Westin Book Cadillac, and included some returnees who also came on Buick's tab in January during the auto show. Others got their first look at post-bankruptcy Detroit.
Stops included the obligatory (Motown Museum, DIA, Heidelberg Project), the promotional (GM Tech Center in Warren and Proving Grounds in Milford), the architectural (Capitol Park, One Campus Martius, Chase Tower, Chrysler House, David Whitney House) and the culinary (Gold Cash Gold, Wright & Company). Their guide the first day was Bruce Schwartz," a "relocation ambassador" at Bedrock Real Estate since 2011 and a Quicken Loans veteran who began as a mortgage banker in 1994.
Schwartz compiles participants' tweets from his Bedrock-centric day in a Storify post headlined "What Bloggers Love about Detroit!" Some of those are in our broader compilation below.
Guests drove the Regal GS and the 2016 Cascada convertible, but their ooh-aah tweets are more about urban appeal than about peeling out.
"There's a whole lot of heart in this place," says Northern California writer and podcaster Jennifer Snyder. "Unbelievable progress," tweets Andrew Israel of Aspen, Colo.
"Oh, such a fantastic meal at #WrightandCo.," posts Nyssa C., a "millennial journalist and attorney" blogging since 2012 at The Cultureur. She has 9,900 Twitter followers.
Update, June 7: Nyssa says Detroit is "now one of my favorite cities in the United States." She posts a gallery with 66 photos from two visits this year in tribute to a place where the writer--photographer found "a resilient spirit with a strong comeback story."
Here's more from visitors' tweets during their stay:
