Packages promote tourism

In Columbia Falls, the Columbia Falls Pottery has a rack just inside the door that showcases brochures from every other business on the town’s Main Street. Owner April Adams doesn’t merely want customers to spend their money at the next door down; she encourages them to do so.

In fact, this coming Saturday between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. marks the fourth annual August evening that the handful of Columbia Falls shops, galleries and the 1818 Ruggles House will share in a street-long open house. Not surprisingly, Adams had a hand in organizing the cooperative event, food and music included.

Those are examples of ways that businesses that cater to tourists across both Washington and Hancock counties can promote not just themselves, but the larger region, too.

That was the message Monday at a meeting of the Vacationland Resources Committee, an arm of the Down East Resources Development and Conservation Council.

Linda Marie Golier, the committee’s summer intern from a cultural anthropology program at Northern Arizona University, presented her recent work. She spent the last 10 weeks surveying the two counties’ tourism opportunities that uphold sustainable tourism practices.

She met with 70 business owners and community organizations in her first week. She encountered 75 additional businesses, places and community events on her own. She drafted five package-tour itineraries that include 260 different businesses or sites within Washington and Hancock counties.

Tourists might look to “do” the Grand Lake Stream area, the St. Croix River Valley and the Bold Coast, the Blue Hill Peninsula or Mount Desert Island in a matter of three or four days, based on packages of services and sites that Golier highlights in the tour suggestions. Or they could follow the food along the coast for “A Taste of Down East Maine.”

Golier’s presentation and its recommendations will now be used as a training tool for those 260 business owners – so the bigger tourism picture can be better understood.

Beyond that, the PowerPoint presentation may make a tour of different Chamber of Commerce functions to reach business owners beyond those already aware and supportive of the committee’s work.

“There are a hundred components to tourism, and just saying, ‘We want more tourists’ is not the only consideration,” Golier said.

“There are some precious things in Down East Maine. There is not a lot of pavement, and there are very few big-box stores. The church steeple is still the tallest thing in most towns.

“Those are the kinds of things to keep in mind when you’re trying to attract tourists here.”

Just being a “locally owned business” is not enough Down East, where most business owners can make that claim, Golier said.

Tourist attractions, from gift shops to bed-and-breakfast inns to historical societies, need to be open longer hours, for one thing.

There needs to be better signage, and every business should be able to “give directions from [U.S.] Route 1.”

Business owners also need to work together more and lose their fear of losing money to their “competitors.”

As many as 27 potters who work in the Deer Isle and Blue Hill areas came together last October to coordinate the “Guide to the Peninsula Potters,” four days when tourists could visit 19 galleries and studios within 50 miles of each other.

“That’s an example,” Golier said, “of working together for the common benefit.”