Geotourism to add flare to Mississippi tourism

Published on : Saturday, April 5, 2014

Mississippi-flagWhen Huckleberry Finn and his friend Jim took to the Mississippi River in a flimsy raft on their fictitious adventure, Mark Twain conjured only the moon and a dim lantern’s light to guide them. Which was perhaps the only illumination available during those days.

 

 
But now they could’ve used a geotourism website. Geotourism is a relatively new term for travel. It focuses on a destination’s unique culture and history and intends to have visitors help enrich those qualities rather than turn the place into a typical tourist trap. The National Geographic Society has embraced the model and made it part of a global mission, said James Dion, sustainable tourism program manager with the National Geographic Society.

 

 

An ambitious initiative aimed to link together all 10 states bordering the river so that tourists will be able to enlist a one-stop website to plan trips themed around things like historic sites, parks or food. Created by the National Geographic Society, the project would feature interactive maps, smartphone apps and social media to help tourists discover the uniquely American riverway that slices through the heartland. It’s expected to take off in the next couple of years.
 

 
While geotourism encourages treading lightly on the environment, it’s also about experiences that are authentic to a place, rather than contrived. The Mississippi River is a natural for geotourism, Dion said, given its richly varied cultures, from its rustic headwater region to bustling St. Louis and Memphis, pockets of history like Vicksburg, to bawdy New Orleans.

 

 

“People don’t travel to states, they travel to experiences,” Dion said.

The website would be built based on information gathered from hundreds of tourist-related businesses all along the river and posted at no cost, backed by both the experience and marketing cachet of the National Geographic Society, Dion said.

 

It’s much more than a website that connects tourism businesses across the river corridor, he added. It would involve branding the river as a unique world-class tourist destination, raise awareness of the river’s cultural heritage and spark local tourism planning and growth.
 
The geotourism effort includes nearly a dozen projects across the country (and more around the world), from Yellowstone and the Four Corners region in the West to the East Tennessee River Valley in the Southeast to the St. Lawrence Seaway in the Northeast. Most recently, partly spurred by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, a geotourism project was put into place for the Gulf states in the South to help their economies recover.
 
In 2008, the National Geographic Society and five federal agencies — the Agriculture and Interior departments, the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Forest Service — entered into a formal agreement to adopt the principles of geotourism.
 
“The idea was that National Geographic would put together a program to help draw tourism to the greater parts of our country,” said Terry Eastin, executive director of the Arkansas-based Mississippi River Trail and a board member of the Mississippi River Connections Collaborative, a coalition of groups that is helping spearhead the geotourism effort.

 

 

 

Tags:

Comments are closed.

arrow2Follow Us
 
facebook-logo  twitter-logo  LinkedIn_logo  stumbleupon-logo   rss_logo 

SUBSCRIBE NEWSLETTER:

Email 
 

ADVERTISEMENT

    TRAVEL INDUSTRY EVENTS

    More Events...