Tourism Promotion for Delaware County

My name is Evan Bowker and I am the economic development specialist for Delaware County Department of Economic Development. As you may have learned we are the new Tourism Promotion Agency for Delaware County. Among these responsibilities, we have a role in marketing to out-of-county tourists to come and visit Delaware County. Part of this is crafting a message to these prospective visitors that accurately and attractively depicts the County and its assets. We would like to include tourism industry and community stakeholders such as yourself in this messaging. It has been our belief and goal that your firsthand knowledge of these visitors will provide valuable insight which can, in turn, further increase visitorship.

As you can imagine, a county the size of Rhode Island with different visitors from Sidney to Margaretville and diverse industry from Deposit to East Meredith can be difficult to fit into one targeted message. In order to achieve our goal of using a ground roots approach to our marketing efforts, we will start holding meetings within four separate tourism zones of the County. We created these zones with the belief that they share similar visitors, landscape and tourism industries. We would like you to be a part of the “Reservoir Region” Tourism Zone which includes the towns of Walton, Tompkins, Deposit, Hancock and Colchester.

You can find a map of this region here and a map of all regions here.

COUNTY RECREATION RESERVOIR REGION

COUNTY TOURISM ZONE

PLEASE FILL OUT THE POLL BY CLICKING HERE!

I would like to add that these sections were created for the purpose of these marketing efforts, and if you feel your business or organization is more closely tied to another town or zone, we do encourage participation between these zones. If you believe you could benefit by attending another zone’s meeting, let me know and I can keep you in touch for those meetings, as well.

During this first meeting, we would like to introduce ourselves and some of our tourism efforts, as well as provide visitor data for your area that may benefit your own marketing efforts. Additionally, we would like to start discussing how you and your fellow stakeholders view your area, your experience with out-of-county visitors and what you think are some important aspects of your area.

If you are interested in attending this first meeting, please fill out this doodle poll with your availability and we will do our best to select a time and date that suits as many people as possible. If you know of anyone else who can also bring good tourism insight to these meetings (including from Friends of the Upper Delaware River,) feel free to share the poll with them or bring them to the meeting.

Thank you for your time and feel free to let us know if you have any questions.