Rural tourism doesn’t come without challenges, according to Tom Chestnutt.
Chief among them, he said, is community buy-in.
“People don’t see tourism as economic development,” said Chestnutt, a coordinator for the Mississippi Alabama Tennessee Tourism Conference being held in Columbus this week. “Second, if they do see tourism as economic development, then they think it can’t happen here.”
The Columbus-Lowndes Convention and Visitors Bureau is hosting about 100 rural tourism leaders for the three-day event that began Monday, all of whom have their own stories of toil and success in using their resources to draw new visitors.
Columbus is hosting the conference for the first time since 2008, CVB Executive Director Nancy Carpenter said. Formerly a Mississippi and Alabama affair, this year is the first in which Tennessee communities have participated.
“I would like for [participants] to see that you can be a small community — we’re a town of 23,000,” she said. “You don’t have to be a Jackson, Mississippi or a Gulf Coast to bring tourists to your town. Every tourist that comes is important, and every tourist spends money — whether it’s coming for the day, the night or several nights. They will spend money for food, gas and other things they purchase while they’re here.”
One conference participant, John Blackburn of Centerville, Tennessee, chairs the National Banana Pudding Festival, the biggest tourism event of the year for his community of 3,200 residents.
This year’s festival, held at the beginning of October, drew more than 7,000 people — so many that Blackburn said the city’s entire police force had to be on-hand to manage traffic for the event. People came to the festival from 81 of Tennessee’s 95 counties, 44 states and 15 foreign countries.
Most importantly, Blackburn said, the volunteer-run festival injected about $100,000 into the local economy and helped more than 30 nonprofits raise more than $35,000.
The festival is an example, he said, of how people can make a big tourist attraction for small communities that might not otherwise have them.
“The only thing holding people back is they don’t know they can do it,” he said. “We proved it. None of us had ever put a festival on before.
“We had no idea, initially, that it would do as well as it’s done, but it has a huge impact,” he added. “It’s probably the single largest tourism impact on our county.”
Chesnutt said the conference is an affordable opportunity for people from rural communities to learn best practices for developing tourism to their areas.
He added it can be especially difficult for people who have lived in a rural community their entire lives to realize that historical or other aspects of their town are interesting to outsiders.
“If we had a Walt Disney World, you’d be successful anyway, but that’s not going to happen in a rural area,” Chesnutt said. “The key is to use what exists, and that’s historical, cultural and natural resources, because they’re there. It’s just about getting across to people what they do have and how they can use that to their benefit.”
Carpenter said historical tourism is one of the biggest things that drives visitors to Columbus. But she noted tourism, for Columbus, comes in many different forms, from agri-tourism to sports tourism.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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