Visitors Bureau's New Vacation Guide Focuses on Year-around Local Events
By Ryan Schlehuber

The St. Ignace vacation guide has been redesigned to focus on promoting St. Ignace as a year-around community with events planned in each season. The guide is a product of the Visitors Bureau and Chamber of Commerce.

Expected to be released in early November, the booklet be half the size of its former magazine style (8.5 inches by 11 inches), said Visitors Bureau Director Lynne Piippo, which will save her agency between $10,000 and $13,000 in mailing costs.

The guide provides visitors with information about the community to help them plan visits to the area. This year's guide features a newly designed calendar of events and map of St. Ignace.

"We want to say this is the best thing about us, to our tourists and our residents," said Mrs. Piippo about the events feature. "Yes, we're a heavily tourist-based area, but we are a year-around, diverse community."

The guide is useful for planning business and residential relocation, she said, since it has information about such community resources as Mackinac Straits Hospital and Long Term Care, laundry services, and schools, for example.

Public and private businesses, listed together in the 2007 guide, will have separate sections.

An estimated 120,000 guides will be published this year, and will be distributed locally, to all 13 state welcome centers, and will be placed in each Chamber of Commerce "goodie bag" handed out to tourists at the marina, campgrounds, and at the Chamber office.

The Visitors Bureau receives hundreds of inquiries a day for information on St. Ignace through its telephone hotlines and its Web site, Mrs. Piippo said. Each of those callers will receive a vacation guide.

Owing to the state's struggling economy and the plateau of statewide tourism, marketing has become ever more important, she said.

"We are not in the bottom range in hotel occupation, compared to the rest of the state," said Mrs. Piippo, "because we've strengthened our marketing program. We are focusing more on promoting our natural scenery and we are building better teamwork within the community, with the Visitors Bureau and Chamber working together, for example."

The two agencies' new "bayside" promotion includes renaming certain events, such as Autumn Apple Day in October, now called Bayside Fall Fest to emphasize St. Ignace's waterfront location.

The creation of the community's Special Events Committee, which includes business and marketing leaders and interested residents, has generated new events, such as the Fish Feast and the Pond Hockey Tournament, Mrs. Piippo said, providing an attractive events package for the guide.