Tours, Tracks, and Trails
Visitors enjoy thematic routes that have been assembled for them. It makes exploring easy.
These route-based experiences can combine any theme your destination has. Some of the most common ones are wine tours, craft brew tours (we think there are already too many of those as now every community thinks it should have one), historic sites, arts locations, nature locations and gardens, and more. One client of ours has a tour of the quilts painted on rural barns in their region. Another has a tour of the Historic Homesteads (farms that have been in business for more than 100 years). Still another has a tour of the hand-painted full-size bears that decorate the streets.
Many historic towns have a historic walking tour. It is very important that the length of these tours be designed for comfortable walking. We discovered that a client had a historic walking tour brochure with 190 locations, many of them no longer standing. We tailored that down to 40 locations of appropriate period buildings with interesting histories.
Heritage trails can also be of any variety. They should begin at an “anchor location” that tells the story of the remainder of the sites. If you do not have an anchor location, create one. Create a display that tells the story of the trail within the local visitor center, or local library. Once visitors have had the opportunity to learn the story, set them out on a geographically cohesive route to other locations that support the story and still other locations that are only “drive-by” but contribute to the experience.
In work with a small town that needed to increase its visitor population as quickly as possible, we created seven different thematic trails that included: an Ironmasters tour of the original iron furnaces and ironmasters mansions that were still standing, a unique foodways tour that included the ethnic specialties served in the region, a tasting trail that included the distilleries, breweries, and wineries in the area, and a museums tour that included the offerings of the larger city nearby. They became the most clicked on and downloaded items on the new website as soon as they were posted and brought new visitors into town as they all started and ended in the historic community.
As you begin to think about the tours, trails and tracks you can create in your community, be generous in your thinking. Scenic routes abound, even if they are not designated scenic byways. Visitors are interested in many types of experiences, and we’ve been told that we can create a trail out of most anything. Your destination likely has that potential as well.
