CVB continue drafting best management practices, hear Truly360 report

The Convention and Visitor Bureau met last Thursday, Jan. 16, to continue discussing their rough draft of their tourism best management practices document. The TBMP document, as covered in previous articles, is a collection of guidelines that tourism-related businesses agree to abide by. This is meant to help minimize the impacts tourism can have on the day-to-day life of a community, as well as to help settle disagreements between tourist organizations.

Wrangell has been working on making a document of their own since November of 2019. Different members of the bureau have been workshopping this document, adding items they think are important, discussing what categories of the document would be most important to Wrangell, and trying to decide how extensive the document would really need to be.

A rough draft, provided at the meeting, has a table of contents that covers topics such as transportation and vehicle guidelines, hiking trails, docks and harbors, "flightseeing," and other items. For example, one of the guidelines in this draft document reads "sightseeing vehicle drivers agree not to impede normal traffic flow by slowing down or stopping in driving lanes for sightseeing opportunities." Other sections of the guidelines state that visiting cruise ships will agree to comply with visible emissions standards, and will minimize P.A. announcements, whistle signals, and outdoor entertainment while docked in town.

Bureau Member Brenda Schwartz-Yeager said that they should try to hold some meetings with local operators on the document, to get their input, sometime in April or May. Economic Development Director Carol Rushmore said they should try to hold it sooner rather than later, if they want the document in place in time for the summer tourist season.

Another of the major topics in the bureau's meeting was a report from Truly360, a company the bureau decided to make an agreement with for search engine optimization. Truly360 worked with Wrangell and its businesses to utilize Google better, such as getting their websites higher up in listings and creating virtual tours of important locations around town. Truly360 provided the bureau with a report of how Wrangell has been doing online for the past four months, from August to December of 2019. In the past four months, according to the report, locations in Wrangell have been viewed over 95,000 times online, the majority of which came from Google Maps. There were 51,483 searches for Wrangell locations on Google, as well, an increase of 140.64 percent from the last four months of 2018. About half of these were "direct searches," which Rushmore explained was when people knew specifically what they were looking for when they went to Google. The other half were "discovery" searches. This meant that they were searching for general terms like "things to do in Wrangell," or "parks in the Wrangell area." These searches and views resulted in 1,143 actions, an increase of 22.12 percent. These actions included things like customers visiting a business's website, asking for directions, or giving the business a phone call.