The cover of the winter edition of the Telluride and Mountain Village Visitors Guide.
“Yes,” says Michael Martelon, CEO of the Telluride Tourism Board, “this may be the first time the cover of the visitors guide is not of a skier or the mountain.”
The reason, he explains, is that people who request the visitors guide or read it once the arrive to Telluride are already interested in skiing. “They know about our wonderful skiing and our great mountain. With the visitors guide we wanted to illustrate the depth of our local culture and show all of the other things that are available here.”
The guide, published by Telluride Publishing in partnership with the Tourism Board, is the first to be produced since Martelon took the reins of the local marketing agency. The winter guide will be officially launched today, Thursday, October 13, at a reception at Cosmopolitan restaurant in Telluride at 4 p.m. The public is invited.
Martelon’s touch is evident throughout the winter guide, which has been reorganized to put “resort branding” in the front of the book and the listings of local businesses at the back.
“This year,” he writes in a letter on page 4, “we’re trying even harder with our Visitor’s Guide to give you a sense of our community.”
To that end there are brief profiles of a number of local personalities who work with visitors. Among others, there are stories about Jody Lambert, who works as the Certified Destination Concierge at the Tourism Board, Noah Sheedy, director of the Telluride Ski and Snowboard School, Robert Weatherford, who teaches art at the Ah Haa School, chef Chad Scothorn, owner of Cosmopolitan, and Elizabeth Tracy, Youth Services Director at the Wilkinson Public Library.
“The idea is to celebrate the people and personalities who make up the brand,” Martelon said. “We are using the Visitors Guide to brand the resort. We want readers to be romanced by the destination and all that we offer.”
Also on display throughout the Visitors Guide are destination ads that are part of the Tourism Bureau’s “in a word” campaign. “Breathtaking” describes a Telluride wedding, for example, and “Effortless” the experience of booking a vacation through the Visitors Bureau.
Eighty thousand copies of the Visitors Guide have been printed. They will be mailed as a fulfillment piece in response to requests for information about the resort and will be widely distributed at hotels and racks in Telluride and Mountain Village all winter long.
This is an improvement but will not have any effect on bottom line revenue. To get bottom line revenue improving you need to encourage people to come here.
Lets take a look at the current strategy:
1. Create groups of four to play games about Telluride and Mountain Village. Has this found the dustbin of history yet?
2. Write about local personalities in the tourism mailer.
3. Keep prices the same for the ski pass.
Meanwhile, out in the market place ski and boarding consumers are opening packages and getting emails daily with discount coupons, video trailers, group rates, ski one get one day, etc. This allows people to really get some value for the ever decreasing wallets in the US (see Barack Obama economy in wiki).
Will they choose Telluride? I hope so but it wont be about the local brand. It will be about the mountain, the improvements Riley and Co have made, and pricing. Our pricing is awful compared to the marketplace. Too high. Too high across the board, few places to stay of merit, few decent restaurants. (Been to Snowmass Village lately? Fantastic places to stay and a thriving local town).
What happened to the old model-lower prices, get people interested in coming, increase tourism traffic, get hotels interested in building since traffic is through the roof, restaurants spring up like weeds in the late spring, etc?
Must be the new math...