Jane Howard
On Tuesday, October 13, 2009, five days after Bill Hansen of the Lutsen-Tofte Tourism Association (LTTA) talked to the Tofte town board about a possible merging of Cook County tourism associations, LTTA Vice-President Jim Vick discussed the possibility with the Schroeder town board.
“We’re the bigger picture,” Vick stated. “[We’re] trying to get visitors here from outside the area.” LTTA uses radio spots, billboards, and direct mailings to steer people to the LTTA website. In the late summer, an 82,000-piece mailing brought an 8% response, which according to Vick is “huge.”
“…Tourism is down across the nation,” Vick said, a significant concern in a community like this that depends so much on tourism. Duluth has outpaced Cook County in attracting visitors in recent years, he said. “They’re winning the battle.”
Combining the efforts of LTTA, the Grand Marais Area Tourism Association, and the Gunflint Trail Tourism Association would eliminate redundancies in marketing and promotion, Vick said, and pooling their money would allow them to buy better media ads.
While the countywide association Vick talked about would be promoting the entire area, the makeup of its board of directors as well as the focus of its promotions would be in proportion to where the association’s dollars were coming from. Schroeder supervisor Cathy Johnson was afraid that smaller businesses might not be represented. “It sounds like an interesting prospect to me,” she said. “We might get more bang for our buck, but I’m concerned that something might get lost in the shuffle.”
Another concern raised in recent Tofte and Schroeder board meetings regarded the possibility of LTTA vacating its presence in the North Shore Commercial Fishing Museum in Tofte. According to Vick, a visitors’ center will stay in Tofte in the short run, although the LTTA board is not sure if that’s the best place in the long run. Visitors’ centers will always be located in the West End and in Grand Marais, he said.
If the tourist information center moves, Bluefin Bay owner and LTTA member Dennis Rysdahl said, it won’t move east – it will move west, closer to the county line. Drawing attention to the fishing museum is difficult because it is located in the midst of many other buildings, he said.
In the past decade, the West End tourist business, at least as measured by lodging taxes collected, has not kept pace with inflation. We need to get visitors here, Vick said. Businesses and jobs are depending on it.
Duluth and Door County, Wisconsin both have more advertising dollars than Cook County, Rysdahl said. “We’re feeling like we really need to elevate our visibility in the marketplace,” he said, and that will take cooperation and advertising dollars. “We’re not competing very well. We need to create a bigger message and sell a bigger area, that being Cook County,” he said.
Vick acknowledged concerns from the Schroeder town board regarding its representation in LTTA marketing efforts and invited the supervisors to continue attending LTTA meetings. “Are we still your association?” he asked. The board responded by voting to set up a bank account from which lodging tax payments to LTTA will be made. “If you have other concerns, invite us down,” Vick said.
The 3% lodging tax generated about $15,000 from Schroeder lodging establishments last year.
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