Set up a Taste and Tour of your small town

Local coleslaw from Gayville, South Dakota

You have your own local food specialties. Show them off while educating your locals with a Taste and Tour event. Photo by Becky McCray.

Here’s another great small town/rural tourism idea you can steal, this one from Canada.

A two-day Taste & Tour Middlesex Conference started off with networking and local food. It’s important to do the fun stuff first. Then they turned to learning the second day, with a traditional conference event.

“Tourism continues to be one of the fastest growing economic drivers in Ontario and as Tourism Middlesex continues to evolve and grow not only will we have a louder voice in the County but also across our region.” [Source: http://www.strathroyagedispatch.com/2013/06/11/taste-and-tour-middlesex-conference-held]

You’ll find Tourism Middlesex at www.tourmiddlesex.ca

So any local or regional group could combine the fun and learning together into an event people really do want to attend.

But instead of targeting only tourism professionals or tourism businesses, open the fun part up to more locals. Anybody! Invite them all to come out, taste, and then give them a bonus: more information about what they can see and do in their own neighborhood.

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.