Rural Tourism Conference slated for April - mark your calendars!

Well, the Rural Tourism Conference is slated to continue so mark your calendars for April 19-21st, 2011 and plan to travel to 108 Mile House to the conference venue at Hills Health Ranch. The steering committee has met a few times and will be posting more details on the conference theme soon but in the meantime plan to attend.

How is this conference different from other tourism conferences and why should you attend? This conference focuses on sharing knowledge and useful applications that are intended for those working in tourism within a rural context. The emphasis is on education and network creation in a rural learning environment where operators, community leaders, educators and students are all in attendance and equal participants. If you are interested in attending a gathering of the minds with people who understand your reality and who are coming up with solutions that may work to advance tourism in rural areas - this conference is worth the trip. Expect a couple of days of talks, workshops, hands on sessions and socializing. Leave with new insights, innovative ideas and a network of folks you can call upon after the conference is done.

The conference is being co-hosted by three academic partners, all from the Tourism Research Innovation Project - Thompson Rivers University, University of Northern BC and Vancouver Island University. We will have our students involved in the planning and will be inviting participation from other organizations to play a role as we move forward.

I plan to organize a traveling conference prior to the conference where operators and students will travel together to various venues in the region learning about topics that enhance the competitiveness of small and medium sized businesses. The funding application will go in soon but my intent is to provide a subsidy for operators to enable them to participate. More on this as I get more details but if you are keen and available from April 13 to the 20th (last three days at the conference), let me know.

More to come - stay tuned and I will post the website with more details as soon as we have them - for now though, mark your calendar as this one is sure to sell out.