This weekend, I traveled 8 hours from Fort Collins to Crested Butte to attend the Colorado Governor’s Tourism Conference. The conference features workshops from destination marketing organizations and the Colorado tourism industry, at large. The event was called “LIFT” (they designed a very cute logo btw) and was put on by the Colorado Tourism Office.

I learned some good things and these types of events always get my mind spinning with fresh ideas. (Blog post on how tourism can help save elephants to follow…)

Here’s a run down of the conference:

First Speaker – Elizabeth Becker

Elizabeth Becker author of Overbooked is the first speaker at the event. “There’s nothing that can’t be turned into a travel package,” Becker said. Food tourism, medical tourism, faith tourism – are all trends in the tourism industry. She spoke a lot on France because it attracts more tourism than any other place in the world and apparently is the biggest ski attraction (which I thought that was interesting considering Colorado is a BIG ski industry).

The most interesting take away from Becker was how tourism can help the environment, our eco-system and the economy. For an example, Costa Rica focuses on preservation of their forests, tourism has helped save elephants from pouching, and, when done right, countries can control their own story by cultural enrichment, education and story telling.

Message to Colorado: “Don’t let tourists love you to death.” She stressed the importance of really thinking out infrastructure, working with government, and figuring out the best way to be a great place for a tourism destination.

Speaker #2 – Governor John Hickenlooper 

I didn’t know much about the Governor because I’m still fairly new to Colorado (moved here in January), but he seems very progressive in his ways and believes that tourism is essential to Colorado. Not only by providing more tourism opportunities in Colorado, but preserving our lands and keeping our environment clean and beautiful. He spoke briefly about the “Colorado Beautiful” initiative, which links outdoor spaces to people who want to connect with those places and the “Come to Life” campaign which he described as “the best campaign in the country right now, and probably one of the best ever.” Here’s one of the videos from the campaign:

 

 

Amazing video. My next goal: make a video like the one above…

There’s a lot more to the conference, but all in all it was great and I learned a PLETHORA of information.