Northern Forest Tourism Network
Collaborating to Create a World Class Destination – Join Us!Rural Destination Tourism – What
The Case for a New Approach to Tourism: As the industrial manufacturing economy in the Northern Forest Region continues to decline, interest and investment in the tourism economy is of significant interest to many. Numerous private, non-profit, and agency partners at the regional, state, county, and community level are working hard to ramp up and improve tourism strategies in order to generate real economic gains. While much creative and positive work is underway, the reality of creating economic gains of a meaningful scale has been uncertain, due in large part to the fact that the various initiatives are widely dispersed, relatively small-scale, generally undercapitalized, and too narrowly focused in terms of market segmentation.
Rural Destination Tourism: The Rural Destination Tourism Network Initiative (RDT) represents an intentional effort to create new networks at various scales that incorporate real collaboration in order to attain maximum results. The Northern Forest Tourism Network is the regional umbrella for this initiative. The operating approach of this model is to partner with existing tourism initiatives and players, creating new opportunity through better coordination. We are particularly interested in collaborative tourism product development and marketing focused on authentic and intimate place-based tourism experiences with high quality customer service standards. Overall, the RDT initiative is focused on both a process and a set of outcomes that will together create lasting capacity for the region.
- The process is network-based, with multiple stakeholders joining together around shared tourism goals to create effective and efficient models for attracting, serving, and sustaining productive visitor interest in rural locales. Efforts that were previously diffuse and scattered can come together through this model to build toward success.
- The outcomes include increased tourism capacity through shared marketing, training, etc.; increased return on tourism investments as real collaborations yield best practices at the community, county, state, and regional scales; and rural capacity gains for the long-term as diverse partners develop new patterns of organizing for successful outcomes.
We are actively aligning our process and intended outcomes with goals laid out in the Sustainable Economy Initiative, coordinated by the Northern Forest Center.
