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I think the best tourism strategy is to focus on being a more livable city and more visitors will follow. For instance, I don't think the focus should be on making downtown a tourist destination, but to make it a more highly functional downtown. That makes it more authentic and hopefully keeps it more inclusive.
I agree. Focus on making Columbia a great place to live and do business, and everything else will follow.
We should be taking notes from such places as Raleigh, Austin, and Nashville; instead of trying to complete with Charleston.
Here's a pretty good article in this week's edition of the Free Times about Columbia's tourism potential that touches on some subjects we've discussed in other threads. A relevant excerpt:
It’s long-held tradition for any self-aware Columbia resident to bemoan the affable blandness of the city. We’re a college town, a government town and a military town, a football town with a drinking problem or a drinking town with a football problem, what have you. Or, as has often been said, the best thing about Columbia is that we’re only two hours from the beach, two hours from the mountains and less than two hours from Charlotte, which, if you haven’t heard, has a lot.
That popular perception, both outside the city but especially among its residents, has long served to dampen the potential and possibilities that Columbia presents as a veritable tourism destination.
“I think that’s relatively true,” when asked about this self-deprecating attitude, agrees Lee Snelgrove. He’s the executive director for the city-backed nonprofit One Columbia for Arts & History, tasked with growing local culture to help grow tourism.
“We’ve long talked about it as Columbia’s self-esteem issue,” he continues, “and a lot of people do talk about Columbia just being close to the beach and close to the mountains. We’re maybe a little later to develop because we haven’t thought of ourselves as a real tourist destination.”
That line of thinking that can be easy to fall into, but it’s easy to flip the notion on its head. The city also boasts the biggest gated tourism attraction in the state (Riverbanks Zoo), the largest children’s museum in the Southeast (Edventure), the state’s only national park (Congaree), and a wealth of arts and cultural institutions (the Columbia Museum of Art, two professional ballet companies, the Nickelodeon Theatre, the South Carolina Philharmonic, a thriving theatre community, and various cultural offerings from the state’s largest university).
But people who are within easy travel to Columbia have many other options. Those who live in the Atlanta area, for instance, could get to Asheville, the ballyhooed jewel of the Western North Carolina mountains, just as easily as they could get here. Indeed, that snarky line about Columbia’s best asset being proximity to other places — Charlotte, Charleston, the Grand Strand, etc. — is the flip side of one of the city’s biggest challenges when it comes to attracting visitors: “Why should I go there when I could go here?”...
“In some of the research we did when we were doing a brand refresh a few years ago, we found that people within the state of South Carolina have a less favorable perception of Columbia than people outside the state of South Carolina,” offers Kelly Barbrey, vice president of marketing and communications at Experience Columbia, the Midlands’ chief tourism authority. “We want to really encourage residents to be excited about Columbia and be as big of cheerleaders for Columbia as we are.”
But in recent years, sentiments about Columbia from both outside and within seem to be shifting. The combination of the Main Street District revitalization, an increasingly sophisticated food and beverage scene, and a newly emboldened and energetic arts community has given the city a renewed sense of cool.
Numerous regional and national publications, including Thrillist (which highlighted “18 Must-Try Restaurants in Columbia, SC” in August) and the U.S. News and World Report (which calls Columbia “a traditionally Southern place with a modern twist”), have highlighted the city as an underrated tourism destination.
This is a biased article.. isn't the Free Times now based in Charleston? So its like a tongue in cheek bash fired from the Coastal Empire like the attack on Ft. Sumter.. .What say you good sir.. Charlestondata
On a more serious note.. what is "manageable urban"? Homeless people that are harmless or that sit quitetly with signs for help or that play music and juggle oranges for money????? Gangs of teens on skateboards or bikes but they ride in a nice orderly fashion on the edge of the street but not in traffic or on the sidewalks; pigeons that don't fly wildly on to your table desperately snatching food from your fingers and as you fight them away the food falls on the ground only to be attacked by flocks of sparrows ????
This is a biased article.. isn't the Free Times now based in Charleston? So its like a tongue in cheek bash fired from the Coastal Empire like the attack on Ft. Sumter.. .What say you good sir.. Charlestondata
On a more serious note.. what is "manageable urban"? Homeless people that are harmless or that sit quitetly with signs for help or that play music and juggle oranges for money????? Gangs of teens on skateboards or bikes but they ride in a nice orderly fashion on the edge of the street but not in traffic or on the sidewalks; pigeons that don't fly wildly on to your table desperately snatching food from your fingers and as you fight them away the food falls on the ground only to be attacked by flocks of sparrows ????
I think it is well written and timely. I believe Columbians, especially those who write about it, should quit talking about other places.
I think it is well written and timely. I believe Columbians, especially those who write about it, should quit talking about other places.
That's not nearly as unusual as you think it is. Savannah is probably mentioned in the same breath as Charleston more frequently than any city is mentioned along with Columbia. Charlotte is in a similar position as Columbia, being central to the Carolinas and not located on the coast or in the mountains and its proximity to other cities in both states (and Atlanta) is often touted. One of the benefits of living in the Bos-Wash corridor that is often mentioned is the proximity of its constituent cities to the corridor's other cities. And so on and so forth.
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