Angelica Ramos
Contributing Writer
MONTGOMERY COUNTY- David E. Rotenizer, Executive Director of Tourism for Montgomery County, says the tourism office has been busy since September 2023 when ARPA Funds were used to build a foundation for tourism.
Rotenizer explained roughly $50 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds went to the general assembly who then allocated the funds by county and city. Montgomery County received $180,000 to be used for tourism.
Building toward a future for Montgomery County tourism, the ARPA funds were allocated to five projects: obtaining a spread in the 2024 Virginia State Travel Guide, having two media or “FAM” tours, Destination Optimization, an asset inventory of outdoor tourism; and focusing on messaging and strategic recommendations.
With the anticipation of passenger rail arriving in Blacksburg via Amtrak, a process that has been on-going for well over a decade, Rotenizer and his team focused the ARPA funds on optimizing tourism opportunities, educating our local businesses and highlighting the abundance of tourism opportunities Montgomery County has to offer. With each of the five projects, the Montgomery County Tourism Office focused on aspects of tourism that needed to be addressed and ways to spread the word about the wonders one can find in Montgomery County.
The two-page spread in the 2024 Virginia State Travel Guide was a first for Montgomery County, Rotenizer said, adding Montgomery County had never been highlighted in the guide before, let alone in the Southwest Virginia: Blue Ridge Highlands portion. The content highlights the arts and culture of Blacksburg, Christiansburg and the rest of Montgomery County as well as recreation, dining and the universities.
“It’s marketing,” Rotenizer said, “but, to me, it’s also foundation building. Now that we have secured this, we have first right of refusal if we ever want to advertise here again and build a presence there.”
The FAM tours are defined as familiarization trips where people from different forms of media come to learn about a destination, place, tourism board, etc. Part of the Fam Tours for Montgomery County included podcast segments with an NPR affiliate, KCBX. The Podcast channel is called Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer where he featured the Blacksburg Farmers Market, The Lyric Theatre, Moon Hollow Brewing and so much more. The FAM tours were split in half, one half has already occurred, and the other half will be in the fall.
“What is Destination Optimization? Well, to me,” Rotenizer said, “of all the things we did, this is probably the most consequential for the tourism program and the most challenging. Destination Optimization, basically, the main thing is they’re looking at is Google Business Profiles. As part of the package, they audited up to 800 Google business profiles. They did the audit out of the 800 and we paid extra and audited 1500 businesses. Surprisingly, around 20 percent of our Google business profiles had not been verified.”
Rotenizer further explained that as part of the process to verify and have business owners take charge of their business profiles, they held a workshop where they were registered and then attended a webinar that explained the basics of Google Business profiles. A few weeks later, they hosted another on Advanced Google Business profiles. This was then followed by an in-person workshop and asking questions or using office hours for a one-on-one meeting and help. This was part of the foundation building Rotenizer and his team are doing to help businesses gain those skills and help tourists have accurate and up-to-date information when they are visiting Montgomery County. Most of us, when we visit a new place, Google places: to eat, the best hotels, activities to do with our families, etc. This step in the process was to optimize that for the community and business.
The asset inventory was an extensive audit of all the sports tourism and outdoor recreation Montgomery county has. This included the playing fields, parks and anything sports related. This was done to get a big picture of sports tourism for the whole county and try to bridge those places and build a foundation to grow from the data.
The Montgomery County Tourism Office is also working on visual updates and strategic recommendations starting with things like updating their website to populate those Google Business profiles for online visitors and much more. Since September, the tourism office has worked to allocate the ARPA funds towards foundation building and foundation strengthening assets in the hope tourism in Montgomery County grows and thrives.
