On Thursday evening at the St. Regis Community Center, Raecean Friede, president and CEO of Western Montana Glacier Country, hosted a town hall meeting to hear input from Mineral County residents about visitors and tourism to the region.
She also discussed the management plan for the area, which was developed as a result of the 2021 Town Hall Meeting.
“When things went haywire in 2020, we were overwhelmed by the influx of people into Montana during the height of a pandemic,” she told the small audience. “At the time, our community didn’t have the capacity to accommodate all of those people. Businesses that were allowed to open were operating with skeleton staff. Housing prices began to skyrocket. We knew at that point that we needed to rethink our mission of marketing western Montana to out-of-state visitors. Through a series of meetings and strategic planning, we realized we needed to focus first and foremost on our residents and quality of life.”
The changed policy came from the Glacier Country Board of Trustees, which has shifted its mission to become what’s known as a destination management organization.
Friede explained that it’s all about balancing quality of life for residents with a quality experience for visitors.
“What we’re really trying to do is how do we blend the marketing aspect with a more collaborative approach with the local community to find out what they want from us,” she explained.
For the past several years, Glacier Country, funded in part by a lodging tax, has been responsible for promoting Western Montana as a tourist destination through an out-of-state campaign to attract visitors from across the U.S. In addition, it publishes a deluxe travel guide that promotes the region’s eight counties and urban and rural activities.
They will continue to market to the area, but in a very targeted way. The addition of a Community Engagement Director will allow the organization to market while listening to the needs and desires of the local community.
The information related to Mineral County came from questions about when the St. Regis needs more travelers and what services they could consider that people traveling to Superior have requested, as well as ways to train front-line staff (waitresses, bartenders, cashiers, etc.) on how to respond when asked what can be done in the area.
The group’s website, glaciermt.com, is a hub where merchants can share information with tourists, who may be so well informed that they delay leaving Mineral County and stay an extra day.
Glacier Country is also a resource that connects businesses with grant funding that addresses a variety of tourism needs.
“What do seasonal businesses need, what is their capacity and is it enough?” she asked the audience, using the example of the number of bikes available to rent at Lookout Pass to ride the Hiawatha Trail. Glacier Country is a partner that supports and serves businesses in the tourism industry, the state’s second largest economic driver.
“This is a 10-year plan, and we’ve been working on it for a few years now,” Friede said, “so it’s new for everybody, and we’re learning more from the communities we visit about their specific needs and the common desires that everyone has.”
But the message was clear: Montanans come first.
