Local Tourism Economy
Extend mapping scope to consider businesses, accommodations, services, events, and other factors within the wider region.
Building a strong outdoor recreation economy in your community might include great trails, ample water access locations, scenic pullouts, welcoming parks, and clean restrooms. Recreational assets, however, are only half of the equation. Tourists are also looking for places to rent gear, buy gas for their snowmobiles or ATVs, enjoy a post- or mid-ride meal, frequent a farmstand, and find a Wi-Fi signal to check work emails from the road.
This tool will help you inventory and map the supporting businesses and services within and surrounding your community. Being able to map out and visualize this information, as has been emphasized throughout this entire module, will help you better understand where and how outdoor recreation users interact with your community and identify possible gaps in key services.
In contrast to the ready-made datasets that you have been introduced to in this module’s earlier tools, when it comes to finding data layers about local businesses and services important to visitors, there are no options that are comprehensive and up-to-date for your community. Don’t worry! This tool will provide guidance to quickly and easily create your own map and dataset using Google My Maps.
Completion of this tool will help you:
- Inventory and map the visitor services that support your local outdoor recreation tourism economy;
- Create your own maps and data layers to better visualize your local tourism economy’s footprint; and
- Integrate businesses and services data into your wider recreation planning efforts.
This tool will help your community begin to:
- Develop a broader understanding of your community’s and your region’s capacity to meet tourists’ needs when they visit to recreate;
- Identify strengths and gaps in services needed to build a robust local tourism economy;
- Engage more fully with local business leaders to better understand the needs and experiences of the visitors who frequent their businesses, and to share ideas about new recreational opportunities; and
- Lay groundwork for conducting a more formal economic impact assessment in your community.
What Do Visitors Need?
Before beginning to inventory local businesses, take a minute to think about your own experiences and needs when you go on a daytrip or vacation. Like potential visitors to your community, you are likely thinking about places to eat, sleep, buy gas, charge an EV, and where to get advice about what to do and where to go when not recreating.
Some services are specific to outdoor activities, like gear shops, guiding services, and campgrounds; others widely benefit tourists and residents going about their daily lives. These can include businesses such as grocery stores, motels and RV parks, equipment rental services, and restaurants; or public amenities such as libraries, visitor information centers, recreation centers, and town halls.
Your community may not have all these services, and that is not necessarily a problem. Cast a wider geographic net when inventorying services and consider how adjacent communities and regional service centers help meet the full spectrum of visitor needs.
Inventorying and Categorizing Services
The following general categories are suggested for organizing your inventory of businesses and visitor services. Feel free to adjust these categories to best reflect visitor needs in your community.
- Accommodations (camping, lodging, hotels, motels, B&Bs)
- Food and Drink (restaurants, diners, bakeries, brew pubs, stores)
- Gear and Rentals (bike, ski, and outdoor gear shops)
- Guide Services and Tours (fishing, hunting, dogsledding guides and outfitters)
- Other Visitor Services and Amenities (libraries, chambers of commerce, municipal offices)
While completing this inventory, note other information about each location that might be relevant for longer-term planning purposes.
- Is the business open seasonally or year-round?
- How many guests can be accommodated overnight?
- Does an outfitter have gear for only specific outdoor activities?
- Is the facility accessible for individuals with disabilities or experiencing mobility challenges?
- Is overnight parking available?
How detailed you map this information will depend on what exists in your region and the size of your community. For example, if you have lots of basic services in your area, your inventory might focus on those services that are most closely tied to the outdoor activities that take place in your community.
Pinning Service Using Google My Maps
Once you have a list of what businesses and services you need to map, there are numerous ways to go about mapping them. If you completed the Maps of Outdoor Recreation tool then you know that these locations could be plotted as points on a paper base map of your community or mapped using more complex GIS software.
Google My Maps is a great option for this task because the web-based map tool is free, easy to use, and allows you to leverage Google Maps’ search functionality to quickly determine the locations of businesses in and around your community.
To use Google My Maps, you need a (free) Google Account. Once you are logged in, you can “Create a New Map” to store the locations of local services (as map pins). Zoom the base map to your community to start adding pins for business and services locations.
You can add pins in two ways.
- Use the “Add marker” to place a pin on the map for a business that you can identify and locate from the base map. Name and describe each location in the pin’s popup window.
- Or, use the search bar to type in the name of a specific business and Google My Maps will identify that location to the best of its ability. Click “+ Add to map” in the popup window for the location you search in your working map. You can also use the search bar to search for multiple locations at once by typing, for example, “hotels near [insert your community]”.
Assigning different map pin colors and icons is a convenient way to differentiate businesses by category. You can also organize groups of points in the sidebar using layers. Use “Add layer” to create new group layers into which you can drag specific pins.
Your Google My Maps map can be shared with other users, so you can collaborate and get feedback from your teammates and other local and regional partners. There are additional options that allow you to print your map and pins.
You can also export your map pins (in KML/KMZ format) so that they can be integrated into other digital mapping platforms where you may be storing and mapping other information about your recreational assets in your community.
Where to Go Next
Having taken the time to inventory and map businesses and services that are important to your local tourism economy, the fun and thought-provoking work can begin to happen based on the patterns you see in your data.
- What services does your community have, or not have, and how are they positioned relative to your recreational assets?
- Are there opportunities to locate new recreational infrastructure by existing businesses that may offer parking, food, or Wi-Fi?
- Are there opportunities to support new business development in order to meet the needs of a growing number of visitors coming to your area to recreate?
- How might you begin to partner with local businesses to ensure that your community experiences the maximum economic impact of recreation tourism? See the Partnerships and Regional Collaboration tool for more information on joining forces with local businesses.