Bringing attention to the Foothills as a tourism destination has become the priority of a new association.
The Foothills Tourism Association held its inaugural conference on March 4 at Granary Road.
The association was created earlier this year with the intent to develop and grow a strong agricultural and entrepreneurial rural business community in Foothills. In doing so, the goal is to attract tourists from provincial levels to national and global reach.
Judy Kolk, co-owner of Kayben Farms and the association’s vice-president, said that promoting the region to travellers from further afield of Calgary was one of the main goals of setting up the association.
“We’re always promoting to Calgary and that’s a nice, great market for us, but we’re also recognizing that we want to promote this whole area and each one of our operations to a larger and further audience” she said. “We recognized that each one of us putting forward our own efforts individually to promote to these markets was not going to have the ton of impact that we wanted.
“So we decided to form an organization that’s going to work collaboratively to promote the whole area.”
Serving as an umbrella organization to other tourism efforts, such as Cool Little Towns and tourism attractions, the Foothills association saw significant turnout and support for the endeavour at the
conference on March 4.
Some of the partners of the association include Granary Road, Spruce Meadows, Bar U Ranch, Azuridge Resort and Eau Claire Distillery. But what sets this initiative apart from past attempts to increase tourism in the area is the government partnerships, said Kolk.
“We’ve got Travel Alberta involved, we’ve got Culture and Tourism involved, we’ve got Chamber of Commerce involved, we’ve got municipalities involved and recognizing that all of those different groups and organizations are stakeholders, we wanted to be working collectively with everybody,” she said.
“I’ve been part of other initiatives that did a great job but didn’t have quite as big of a reach, and what we’re excited about is how big of a reach we’ll be able to have with this size of group.”
Based on the interest shown at the conference, Kolk said it will start right away on making plans a reality.
“Immediate next steps are we are rapidly signing up new members, starting a couple of task forces to work on a couple of quick wins like developing the website, and then promoting the website,” she said. “We’d like to see a really solid plan in place to be able to start promoting this area by the beginning of May when most of our seasons actually start.”
The website, foothillstourism.com, is a primary objective for the association. The website is currently active, but a goal is to link directly to members as they sign up, which the association is comprising a task force to focus on.
Another task force will be focusing on long term projects to drive traffic to the website, which will in turn drive traffic to the operators that are connected, said Kolk.
The need for this now, according to Kolk, was to pull all of the individual efforts together.
“We just felt like this was involving so many different entities in this area and is going to have a lot of benefit,” she said. “We just recognized the need for an umbrella organization that was going to be able to serve them all.”
