Community Pride Isn't a Feel-Good Initiative. It's Your Tourism Strategy.

Heritage Tourism Conversations, Episode 3 · Recorded live on Zoom August 5, 2026

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer of HeidiTown Consulting joined Heidi Schlag to make the case that community pride belongs at the center of tourism strategy. Residents who love where they live become better hosts, and every interaction a visitor has, from the museum to the gas station, becomes part of the destination's story. The conversation covers why she says "visitor" instead of "tourist," how she's writing itineraries for every Colorado byway with the people who know those corridors best, and how regional collaboration helps small towns stand out rather than blend together.

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About the Guest

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer is the founder of HeidiTown, a Colorado events, festivals, and travel blog she started in 2007, and HeidiTown Consulting, which she launched in 2023. Her consulting work centers on keynote speaking, including her signature talk "Love Where You Live," and writing the tourism components of municipal comprehensive plans, mostly for rural Colorado communities. She is also writing itineraries for all 26 of Colorado's scenic and historic byways, timed to the state's 150th anniversary in 2026.

What We Talked About

Residents who love where they live make better hosts. Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer's "Love Where You Live" talk grew out of the apathy she noticed while road-tripping through small towns. When residents take their community for granted, tourism and economic development are much harder to get right. Ambassador programs for frontline workers, like the downtown program in Durango, Colorado, help the people who meet visitors every day know what's nearby and share it with genuine enthusiasm.

Say "visitor," not "tourist." She uses "visitor" in every strategy she writes, even when the official name says "tourism." "Tourist" carries baggage in communities that don't see themselves as destinations or that were burned by overtourism during the pandemic, while "visitor" also includes the person in town to see grandma who still deserves a good experience.

Build itineraries with the people who know the route. For each of Colorado's 26 byways, she starts with the official corridor management plan and then sends a questionnaire to byway committee members and stakeholders, since the people who drive a corridor daily know it better than anyone can from a few visits. Each itinerary includes historic stops, scenic overlooks, a featured town, transportation tips, birding spots, and historic lodging.

Regional collaboration helps towns stand out. Northern Colorado DMOs, including Estes Park and Fort Collins, formed the NoCo Tourism Summit because visitors move across their shared region. The real relationships they've built make practical collaboration possible, and she argues for meeting in person whenever you can. Working together also helps each town find what truly sets it apart, which she discovers by walking a community's streets and noticing what's happening now, such as Fort Collins's college-town energy versus nearby Loveland's family feel.

Walk softly with community traditions. In one Eastern Plains town of about 3,200 people, Old Threshers Days began in 1981 when a farmer found an old thresher in his field and invited friends to see if it still ran. The town's real differentiator is its long history of embracing new farm technology, and her advice for any community building on a tradition like this is to respect the people who started it and grow it thoughtfully.

Authenticity is becoming a differentiator. As AI tools spread through tourism marketing, she's watching "real" become more valuable, pointing to a Tennessee campaign that pledged not to use AI-generated photography. She still writes and fact-checks her byway content herself, because clean, reviewed information earns trust from readers and search engines.

Join the next conversation

Heritage Tourism Conversations happen monthly on Zoom, and each one brings together people working in museums, DMOs, scenic byways, heritage areas, Main Streets, and outdoor recreation to learn from each other. Join my email list to get the invitation for upcoming conversations, and see what's coming up next on the Heritage Tourism Conversations page.

Full transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Heidi Schlag: So thank you all for joining us today. I'm really thrilled to have so many of you here with us. For those of you who might be new to this series, I am Heidi Schlag, I'm a heritage tourism consultant, I live in Frederick, Maryland, and I run Heritage Tourism Studio, which I use as an umbrella for my consulting work, but also as a way to be a thought leader and a sort of agitator to try to get all of us who are working in the heritage tourism space, whether that's Main Streets or museums, byways, heritage areas, etc, talking together, working together to provide better visitor experiences for all of the visitors who come to our locations. So this is my third of these talks, and if you weren't able to join us for the previous two, I'll put the link to my YouTube in the chat in just a second so you can view the last two we hosted. And today I'm thrilled to have Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer here with me. We joked when we first met about how similar our names are, and we felt sure we were kindred spirits and would work together in some capacity. So I'm thrilled that you're joining us today, Heidi. I'd love it if you'd mind telling us a little bit about yourself and your experience just to get us started.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Thank you, thanks, Heidi. Yeah, we knew from the beginning that we were going to meet someday in person. So behind me, by the way, is Meeker, Colorado, a rural town of about 3,200 in Northwest Colorado, so I just thought I'd point that out. And I apologize ahead of time, I don't know what's going on with our video, we may need a new one, but I'm sorry if I'm a little bit fuzzy to you, it's this camera I'm using. So I started HeidiTown in 2007, and that's a blog about events, festivals, and travel in Colorado, eventually went beyond that. I like to say that HeidiTown grew up, my blog grew up with my writing career, which actually started a year earlier in 2006, and I started freelance writing at that time. So those two things sort of grew up together. Eventually I specialized in travel writing in my freelance work as well. I started at a little newspaper, which was awesome, and I still like to keep my toe in the newspaper world. But I eventually went on to have columns in a number of magazines, even in Nebraska and Utah. And then the pandemic hit, and travel stopped and the travel industry stopped, not to mention the festival world, which was sort of my bread and butter when it came to my advertisers. So Colorado tourism got hit pretty hard, just to put that out there in case people are unaware. We were always tied with Utah, I'd been going to our tourism conferences for years, and we'd always been fine with Utah and the number one place people wanted to visit, you know, what number one state. And so we had a long way to fall, and unfortunately we did. I think the pandemic hit different places differently, geography-wise, but we had a hard time, and I feel like the industry is still coming back even six years later, and with AI on the scene, it's really changed the face of Colorado tourism. So with everything happening, I decided to quit freelance writing, and I started HeidiTown Consulting in 2023 alongside keeping HeidiTown.com going. And it's two parts, so my consulting company has two parts: I do keynote speaking, not just keynote speaking, but the last speaking engagement I did happened to be a keynote at the NoCo Tourism Summit, but I've been farther flung, Nebraska a couple times, just to do presentations on Love Where You Live. And then also, the secondary part of my work is I do tourism strategies for comprehensive plans for cities and towns, specializing in rural communities here in the state of Colorado. We actually have legislation that says if your municipality has a comprehensive plan done, you're actually required by law to have a tourism component. And that doesn't always necessarily ring very effective for some of our smaller places. And so I love to come aboard with my philosophy that all tourists are visitors, but not all visitors are tourists, but we all have visitors. So I prefer to use the word visitor, so that you don't turn people off right away. So that's kind of, in a nutshell, my background.

Heidi Schlag: Well, thanks so much, a lot of your work overlaps with the heritage tourism field. And one thing I found particularly interesting about what I know of your work is that you help people love the towns they live in. So you're not focused solely on the visitor or the tourist, but you're also focused on the resident. So can you talk a little bit about that, what that looks like in your work and the success you've seen?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Well, absolutely, and it really comes from years of doing HeidiTown. So I've been traveling all over, road tripping, I don't get into planes, I road trip everywhere I go. And I talk to people, much to my husband's chagrin, I talk to everyone, it might be in a brewery, or a coffee shop, or a restaurant. But I would notice throughout my travels a ton of apathy everywhere I went, whereas I was like, I love your town, your town is so cool, you have this, you have that, and they just kind of give you this blank stare. And this apathy became really the way I developed my presentation about Love Where You Live. And I always point to my husband as an example of someone who, Ryan, grew up here in Colorado, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which I think I saw someone from Washington State in here, I'm not sure what side of the state you're from, but I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, way north of Seattle, in this very tiny little rural community where we didn't see the sun very much. So when that sunlight is streaming in my window every morning here in Colorado, 99 of the mornings, I never take it for granted. But Ryan, who's grown up with it, absolutely takes it for granted. So that's just the very easy explanation I have of why we just take things for granted, we're not used to it. And in so many of our rural communities, people have grown up there, and maybe they left for a while, but that's their experience, and so they take for granted everything around them, really. They take for granted that people are nice to you, that doesn't just exist everywhere. So sometimes it really just takes me getting up on a stage and being like, hey, look around you, look at this, look at that, and pointing it out to them, and having them recognize, and going, I love, love, love the aha moment where someone goes, you're right, my town is amazing, this place is amazing that I've lived in for 42 years, you know? So really, that's kind of where that community pride aspect stems from, personal experience.

Heidi Schlag: And I know that that's something that, in my work with DMOs, DMOs are starting to focus in more on their communities in past years, it's always been this focus on the 50-mile radius where they want to bring people into the town, heads and beds. But I'm hearing more and more of this conversation that DMOs are beginning to realize what a key asset the community is, for the reasons you just pointed out, and because they're the ones interacting with the visitors, right, as frontline staff. So do you, when you go into those towns, do you do any sort of training with them, or is it more inspiration, just helping them understand their place in the tourism economy?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Yeah, so actually, my strategy plan work, I usually give that to most communities I've worked with so far. Durango, who happens to be in this chat, I saw Durango's here, but their downtown association actually, I think it's a DDA there, but they actually have an ambassador program, I've known the guy who runs it down there for quite a long time. So he's agreed to let me use that as the example, and I give that to different communities where they can literally train their frontline workers to know what they have, what museums are nearby. I worked with a small town in southeast Colorado, and they were surrounded by, like, four national parks/monuments, these amazing places, but they weren't even really quite aware that stuff was there. So it's a really great ambassador program that Durango, Colorado has put together, I've actually given that, I don't personally run those programs, but I give that idea to them as something they could absolutely utilize. And I feel like you're missing a whole component if the DMO is just looking from the 30,000-foot level and not getting on the ground. It's the people on Main Street who know what's happening on Main Street, they know who's coming through their doors. So if there's not a connection there, and you're just relying, if you're a small town in Colorado and you're relying on some company out in New York or even Denver to tell you how you should be doing tourism in your community, I feel like you're probably doing something wrong, because it's really the people who live there. And also, I would add, if the people who live there don't love where they live, it's really hard, I believe, for economic development, tourism being part of that, to work effectively in a community. Because even with this world we live in, where everything is so immediate, I tell people that experience somebody had at your gas station, if that person's rude to them, you're not going to win at all hearts. But if you can have enough people on the same page of loving where they're at, then they really just put out that better attitude towards everyone.

Heidi Schlag: Well, and I'm sure we've all had the experience where somebody makes a recommendation to you, whether it's a waitress or a shopkeeper, and they speak with such passion about whatever it is they're recommending, that it influences your stay. So that's really something that the DMO through this training program, and Kristen says it's the BID Ambassador Program, thanks for the shout-out, that these types of programs can really make a difference. So you mentioned in your intro how you like to use the word visitor instead of the word tourist, especially in rural towns where they might not be as welcoming to visitors. Can you talk a little bit about your experience there?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Thank you, it's so good. I've always thought for years now that tourism is kind of shooting itself in the foot by saying tourism, tourists. I believe, especially here in Colorado, I think during the pandemic the word tourist got a bad name. When we have our mountains overrun with people, and we have mountain communities where the locals are really annoyed at all the tourists, or you have a small town, like where I grew up, and they don't think of themselves as a tourism community, I have religiously, in my consulting company, said right away, even in the strategies I write, even though the strategy might be called a tourism goal or tourism strategy throughout the document, I always want to be talking about people as visitors. And when I talk to people about that within communities, because I put boots on the ground and I interview people, I interview store owners and business owners, and I tell them my philosophy, and I can't tell you how well that resonates. And if you guys all want to just steal that and go with it, that really resonates with people in a community that doesn't consider themselves to be a tourism community. So we have our Breckenridges and our Vails, I'll be in Vail this weekend, we have those kind of places, tourism is definitely the right word to use in those circles. But when we're talking about places like Lamar, where I have worked, when you use the word visitor, everyone understands that might be someone who's just coming to visit Grandma. But guess what, they're going to have an experience at the gas station, they may go out to eat and have an experience with somebody at a restaurant, and they may actually go to the different historically related things around Lamar. They're going to have those experiences that a classic traditional tourist will have. So I think when you say visitor, it's just an easier way to understand who all is coming to your community, they aren't all traditional tourists.

Heidi Schlag: Right, yeah. So I want to turn a little bit to your work with the Colorado byways, I know this has been a huge project of yours for the past year or so. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing for Colorado byways just to get us started?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: So let me put on that hat, it's all connected. So I'm doing this under HeidiTown Consulting, but the itineraries are actually being posted on HeidiTown.com. I'm working with Colorado Scenic and Historic Byways, which is a division of CDOT, and I am contracted to write 26 byway itineraries of our 26 byways here in Colorado, including, in addition, I'm doing eight blog posts surrounding that. So yesterday I just posted one regarding different agritourism, dude ranches and stuff you can go to on the byways, sort of incorporating those two. And it's just been a lot of work, but it's awesome, I've been on most of the byways, there's only one I haven't driven, some of them I've been on multiple times. So even though I feel like I have a lot of knowledge, I'm learning so much, it's kind of like going and getting a history degree in Colorado. And one of the main reasons, I don't know if other people outside of Colorado know this, but yes, it was the 250th birthday of the United States this year, but it's also the 150th birthday of Colorado. So this is the great American road trip in connection to the birthday of Colorado, the 150th, which we just had officially, the day just passed. And I'm also 50 this year, so I'm a bicentennial baby. So I'll talk real quickly about how I approach each one of them, because coming into this you'd think, hey, I've got this, I know all this stuff, that's not true, and I am very aware of that. So the first thing I do is I go through and take notes off the corridor management plan from each of the byways, each byway has a corridor management plan that they put together with the state of Colorado, because it's an official program. And then what I also do is send a questionnaire out for each byway, specific to each byway, to the committee members and the stakeholders for that byway, because I feel like those are the people, some of them drive it every day, they're going to have more insight than I'm going to have if I was there three or four times, or once, as is the case in many of them. So it's just been a lot, I think it was more work than the person I'm working for, Lenore, and I realized to begin with, once I started putting them together. So it's actually been really fun, and it's a little reminder to me of how amazing our state is, and I know there are people from all other places around on this webinar, but I have to tell you, if you haven't been to our state, it really is the prettiest state. And I've lived in Washington and Oregon, gorgeous states, but without question, if you're going to take the ocean away, we have the most amazing state here, and we have everything from your incredible mountains that are just postcard beautiful, to these little towns on the eastern plains that have the most amazing heritage, especially when it comes to the 250, I mean, this is American heritage, this is the heritage of our country. So it's just been an exciting way to be able to get reacquainted with my own state.

Heidi Schlag: And you and I have talked about, and Wanda and I talked about this in the last call, how byways are often overlooked assets, they exist in every state, and I think Colorado actually does one of the best jobs in the country of actually promoting their scenic byways. But how have you approached that in Colorado, and through your travels, are byways being utilized as well as they could be?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: I have to be careful what I say about this, it's been a little bit frustrating for me. I really was hoping to bring more tourism people to this. I think here in Colorado, every DMO is dealing with, our state has some financial issues right now, so everybody's working with less, and I feel like they don't always have headspace for the byways. I think also, when you talk about Colorado's past of being so tremendously, like, hardly having to do anything and people will come to the state, I mean, we were really the cream of the crop, right, and then the pandemic. And I feel like we're kind of going from being very competitive with each other to realizing that we can't be as competitive with each other, and I feel like the byways will win from that, because I think in the past, every DMO was very protective of their own region, like, my money goes to this place and I'm not going to promote this byway that's then going to send people somewhere else. And I think that traditionally has been a very big part of Colorado's fabric that has changed, it's definitely changing. So I am hitting some difficulties, but I'm also hitting some DMOs going, Heidi, we don't have a byway, this is very exciting for me, actually, I'm working with two places that said, we don't have a byway and we would like you to come just write this heritage trail for us. So there's exciting work coming from it that I didn't realize would. But yes, I think it's hard, and Wanda, if people haven't listened to that, I think Wanda hit the nail on the head when she talked about how DMOs really look at, our money is used for our community, we do not send someone to some other community. And that's what byways are seen as doing. So it's hard, it's a difficult subject.

Heidi Schlag: Yeah, I hear that all the time actually, and it is hard, and something I think about a lot is how the heritage tourism ecosystem is set up by organization, and how the money flows, but that isn't the way the visitor explores the destination. They don't see borders, they don't know when they're crossing from one DMO boundary into the next, they're focused on the experience. So I've spent a lot of time thinking about how we can help visitors have better experiences without tripping over the organizational boundaries that are set up by virtue of the fact that that's how organizations and budgets work. And I don't know the answer, do you have any thoughts?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Right, well, I know we'd talked about talking about the NoCo collaboration that's happening here in Northern Colorado, and I think that would be a good one to talk about in relation to this. So Northern Colorado has come together in the last couple years and put together the NoCo Tourism Summit, and it includes multiple DMOs from Northern Colorado, they've come together. And I believe, this is me kind of from the outside but kind of from the inside, because I live here and I've known some of these DMOs for a very long time, I feel like they've realized that, hey, we understand people don't come here just to go to Estes Park or just to go to Fort Collins, they do multiple stops along the way. And I really think this group, the ones who have really come together to collaborate, they share resources, they share ideas, and I think they've made some friendships over it, and I think that's really key to being able to continue those conversations. And really, that's what it's going to take for the byways to be more effective long-term in that tourism world, for community DMOs to actually realize they're better off working together. And as all of our budgets get cut, little plug, instead of looking to AI, maybe we should look to come together and figure out how we can share resources. I think that's probably the biggest thing right now, being able to say, hey, I know this place, or I know that, I think it really starts with that conversation. And I want to speak to this too, because one of the huge frustrations for me, and it kind of came to a head last year, I had somebody I was talking to on the phone, she's like, I want to have a meeting with you, when are you available on Zoom? And I'm like, you're literally two miles away from my house, why are we doing this on Zoom? Because you're so used to doing all your conversations on Zoom. And I think the more we can actually come together and have face-to-face meetings again, that is going to be extremely important to the future of all business, not just tourism, but all business. Because if we think emails and Zooms are going to be the way to get things done, they're not, unless you have that personal sit-down with someone. It's like I used to say, I won't be friends with you on Facebook unless we've had a beer together. So, yeah.

Heidi Schlag: We have a question from Carol, she said, can you give an example of one of the byways, what is included, so pick your favorite byway and walk us through.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Okay, I'll just probably have to pick the one that's most recently in my head. So in our byway itineraries specifically, we're definitely looking historic, that's one of our main things, historic stops, partly because this is the Colorado 150, so we're tying it in. So definitely museums, and we're trying to make sure we're telling people where all the actual byway overlooks, scenic overlooks, are. We have them pretty well marked, I'm actually really happy that even Google Maps hasn't marked, sometimes I literally drive on Google Earth and go through and I'll be like, oh yeah, I remember that, I'll look at it just to make sure I've got it right. So we put overlooks, we put museums, I'll talk a little bit about a town, which is awesome, because I've been to 99 of them, so I'm able to say, from a boots-on-the-ground perspective, Grand Lake, for instance, has wooden sidewalks, it's just like an old West movie, you know? So I talk a little bit about that. HeidiTown would tell you where to stay, this is where we stayed, this is dog friendly, I don't go into that part as much on the byway itineraries. There's an itinerary section, and then once you get through the itinerary, there's a how-to-get-around/transportation section, some tips to learn a little bit more about the byway, where to stay, and we only put places that are on the national registry or Colorado registry of historic places, that way I think we're not offending anyone. So that's kind of the stops. For instance, right now I'm doing Tracks Across Borders, which is our newest byway in Colorado, and one of the stops is obviously going to be the very underknown Navajo Lake, on Navajo State Reservoir, surrounded by reservation land. It's a little-known lake, but they call it the lake pal of Colorado, it's so huge, I've driven by it and I'm like, wow, this lake is still here. So we'll definitely put stuff like that. I'm a bird nerd, and thankfully Lenore doesn't mind, so I'll put in all the birding connections, and we all know that birders are people who take our byways, so I know that audience is there, and I definitely recognize some of the birding places around Colorado, which I'm even learning about some more of. So I hope that answers the question a little bit, there's a lot in there. I'd say if you really wanted to see what's in the byways, just go to HeidiTown.com and go to one of the itineraries, you can browse through and see everything, because they all follow the same pattern.

Heidi Schlag: I have like two different questions floating around in my head at the same time. Let's go back to what you were talking about with the collaboration of the counties, NoCo, I think you called it. I think what's really interesting and useful from those regional collaborations is that it's sort of, it gets hard for locations located in the same region of the same state to differentiate themselves from each other, and working collaboratively I feel gives you a better opportunity to differentiate yourself from other regions. So I'm curious if you've had any experience working with those collaborations and helping them define what makes them unique.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: I think that is a huge subject, and it's one I personally take very seriously in my strategies, because I do think every town is unique. However, you can go to six different towns in the Colorado Rockies and they all have a mining history, right, so, yes, we say they're unique, but how are they unique? And when we're talking about collaborations, it really is just putting your boots on the ground in that other community, it really is just walking those streets and seeing how they feel different than the streets in my place. Now they may feel really the same here in Northern Colorado, but between Fort Collins and Loveland, you have a massive, CSU is in Fort Collins, you've got a community of a lot of college kids, right, so there's a younger vibe there. Loveland's going to have more of a family-oriented vibe. So beyond history, there are just those things happening right now, how many boutiques are downtown? I've been in a town, it's actually Belle Fourche, South Dakota, and it was humorous to me that every single town had a Western wear shop, and I had several discussions on how do all the Western wear shops stay open, and that's a whole other discussion, because they do have a way to do it. But, I think, oh, I'm such a boots-on-the-ground person, I don't think it's possible, this is a rant of mine, and it's me getting on my pedestal a little bit, but if you're a consultant and you're not physically in a town, I think it's much harder for you to have any understanding of that community. And that's me being a little judgy, I know, but it really is, I don't think ideas from over here will help. Yes, a few of those ideas are going to help, but if you don't co-mingle them, you're definitely never going to find that unique selling proposition of a specific community. So I'm not going to get on that tangent.

Heidi Schlag: If anybody in the room has questions or comments for either of us, please put those in the chat while we keep talking. And Heidi, I'll ask you, for the people listening who might be thinking, what makes my town or my location, whether it's a park or a museum, different from others surrounding me, what are some of the things you tell your clients to think about when trying to put their finger on what makes them unique?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: So it's been really interesting for me to do that exact thing, because I've been working with multiple eastern plains communities, and the eastern plains here in Colorado tend to be very agricultural communities, they, like the Rockies in some ways, all share a little mining history, they all share this very pioneering agricultural history. However, working with these towns and seeing what has developed over the years, as far as a festival for instance, really does help me identify and start talking to them about what I've identified as their unique thing in that community, that they may never have seen, because again, it's forest for the trees, right. So the community I'm working with right now is a town of around 3,200, I don't know, somewhere around there, I'd have to look it up, but they have an event there, well, first of all, of course, it's a very agricultural community, however, turns out they're pretty much the biggest agriculture community on the eastern plains, which I didn't know. So they have a lot going on, and they have this thing called Old Threshers Days, and I'm really excited about this, because I just talked to the president of their board yesterday, and he's really on the same page as me, and we're very excited, he's very interested in growing it. And it really does set them apart, because here's what I think about their community: they've somehow been able to maintain this very successful agricultural base, whereas you have other communities that are struggling, because we all know family farmers struggle and ag is not an easy business to be in. But they've somehow been able to embrace innovation, and really turn ag into something that's really part of their culture from a historic point of view into the modern day. And I feel like that's just something I found, I figured out, in their community, that makes them uniquely their community and sets them apart from all the other little towns. And can I expand on this real quick, about Old Threshers Days, it was founded in 1981, and literally a farmer in his back 40, or whatever, found an old thresher machine in his back 40. So he got his friends together and said, hey, do you want to come over and see if this thing will still work, let's thresh some hay. And basically, that's how the festival got going. And talking with this guy yesterday, most of our communities have these kinds of festivals, a lot of them with roots that go back a long ways in our history, 81 isn't even as long as some other ones I've seen. However, I feel like when we take these events, and we want to talk about heritage tourism, we want to turn them into something that will produce economic success for our community, we need to walk softly. This is a community, for instance, where there are people still alive who put this together originally, we want to be respectful of those people, we want to respect that they put this together, walk softly. And if that's done in a very intentional way, then I think it can be a beautiful thing for that community. But we can't go in there thinking you're going to change everything and make Old Threshers Days something that's going to be on PBS, and we're going to have this big national show about it, and people from hundreds of miles are going to come. That's not what we want, we want to grow it in a thoughtful way, so we're still giving respect to where it came from, what it means to that community's culture.

Heidi Schlag: Absolutely, yeah, I love that. I think doing those events around that differentiator, especially if it's something historic, really is a great way to not only generate tourism, and like you said, you're not trying to bring hundreds of thousands of people to the town, but you're generating some economic development, you're also helping to educate your community. So going back to how we started this call, getting people to love where they live, part of that is helping them understand the heritage.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Exactly, connecting their heritage too, in this community, connecting their heritage to their modern-day culture.

Heidi Schlag: Absolutely, yeah.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: And I think when people who are residents of that community can see that connection, it gives them extra pride in where they're from.

Heidi Schlag: Absolutely, yeah. So we have a few comments and questions. Harriet says, I could really resonate with the observation that you need to make personal connections with people, not expect emails, etc., to be productive, a wholehearted yes to that. Kelli says, I am currently working with a region that is embracing the intersection of outdoor recreation and agritourism, the region itself is nearly 150 miles from point to point. Your conversation on differentiating towns within a region is very relevant to ongoing discussions. Could you share which differentiating factors are of most interest to visitors?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: I think, let me say this, I feel like you have so many different types of visitors, and we're talking about byways, you're generally talking about a little bit older, not old, people my age, who may be a bit of a bird nerd, or maybe you'll have some families. So each of those tourist segments are going to be interested in something different along that area. So I don't think she's talking about a byway, she's talking about 150 miles, and obviously there's different communities within it, but I think really in that situation you have to figure out what strengths particular communities have. One community might have that amazing water park or something, could even be a very small water park, I've seen those too, but it has something really fun for families, and that other town has awesome gravel trails for gravel bikers, and they're going to be the place that gets that person. So I feel like maybe identifying what the strengths are of the communities within that area, because the one thing that drives me nuts is when one place says they can be all things, right, you can't be all things. And I think that partly goes back to why we collaborate with people, because if we know we don't have the best gravel trails in Colorado, we can send them to this town that does, that's just 20 minutes up the road, but they may have their head in a bed here in my community, but they're going to go there and have lunch, so everyone wins in that situation. So I would probably start with figuring out what the strengths are of each of your communities, because there are so many different segments of travelers. I see that from personal experience, my husband and I don't have kids, and so as a person who's been writing about travel, I have to realize there's a big gap in my knowledge, we're like, hey, where's the brewery, that's not what every family is necessarily going to say, well, you've got little kids. So everyone is coming to it a little differently, and you have heritage tourism, we have the history buffs, and that can pretty much stop in every town, because every town has history in it.

Heidi Schlag: Yeah, I agree completely, I think so much of what we're seeing in this heritage tourism world today is people traveling in between destinations, so that's one thing, they're going to have multiple kinds of experiences within a trip. But also the experience is really the most important thing. So I agree with what Heidi said, that identifying what makes each place unique, what's a cool experience they could have, and maximizing that experience through customer service as well. You don't want somebody to show up expecting to have a really great boat trip, for instance, this is actually a story I heard on a podcast, somebody signed up for a boat trip, and their boat captain was hungover.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: No.

Heidi Schlag: And they did not have a good experience at all, because of the person operating the boat that day. So you could have the coolest experience in the world, but if the customer service isn't there to back it up, that also impacts the visitor experience. So lots of moving parts there.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: I'm going to add something really quick to that, so if you're 150 miles and you have all these towns figuring out what their strengths are, I feel like I'm doing this in one of the places I'm working with right now, is, what are your strengths, this is your strength, the circle, it's really great to have all the businesses around in your community know what that strength is, so they can all cater to that. So maybe the brewery has a bike night for gravel bikers, or somehow hook everything together, so when someone comes into that community they know, hey, this is the place I need to be, because I just use gravel biking as an example because it's everywhere right now in Colorado. So.

Heidi Schlag: Yeah, your point is telling a cohesive story.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Exactly.

Heidi Schlag: And then through that collaboration, if everybody knows everybody else's areas of expertise, referrals work much better.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Yes, thank you, that's exactly right.

Heidi Schlag: And then Harriet says, we're an agricultural-based community also, I would like you to expand on how you feel they've embraced technology or other means to accentuate their community, I think she was talking about the Threshers Days.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Yeah, so this actually kind of came off from a conversation I just had, I knew this county has done extremely well in agriculture, not agritourism, agriculture, and after having this lengthy discussion with him, he's exactly my age, been in the business his whole life, third-generation farm owner, he made me realize that perhaps the success for this community has always been that they've embraced the new thing. If there's a new farm implement on the market, they're not going to be afraid of using it, they're going to use it. They have an inventor from their area who created some things way above my pay grade of understanding of agriculture. But there was just an acceptance of that, he said, for years in that community, that we're going to accept the newfangled thing. And he was saying, in his experience, and this would be my experience too, in smaller communities, change is hard, you don't necessarily want to automatically accept it. And I don't know exactly where that comes from, other than it's a very resilient, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of place. So, yeah, I don't know if I have an answer for that.

Heidi Schlag: And if other people have thoughts on that or anything else we've discussed, please put them in the chat. Lara, I am traveling to Colorado in two weeks to visit my sister who just moved from a tourist town, Breckenridge, to a small town, Salida.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Yep.

Heidi Schlag: You've got me so excited to experience her new town and inspire her to experience it too, she works at a brewery.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Of course she does. So, Salida is a wonderful little community, I have to say the Mountain Goat Lodge is one of my favorite destinations there, it's out on the main road in Salida, but she has tons of baby goats every spring, it's an agritourism kind of place, it's a bed and breakfast, and you go cuddle little goats. I also just want to say Browns Canyon is amazing hiking, and it's right there in that area, Salida is a wonderful little community, I think that'll be such a fun place for her to explore.

Heidi Schlag: Awesome. We have a few minutes left, and I wanted to ask you, since we were talking a little bit about technology, I wanted to get your thoughts on AI and how you've seen AI start to change the tourism economy and how visitors are researching and planning trips.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Well, I have some DMOs on with me, so I don't want to offend anybody. I've seen it come all the way from, you know, I was in the heyday of tourism in Colorado, I hate the word influencer, but I was influencing before that word existed, I was writing, I had my audience, I am the mayor of HeidiTown. And then you had influencers who never wrote a word in their life, but they looked cute on video, so you had that whole market come up, and now you have AI, that's the newest and latest and greatest. And I have to be careful here, I understand why DMOs are absolutely jumping on using it, every conference, every seminar is about using AI, and I'm glad they're researching how to use it effectively, I hope they're utilizing it in a smart way. I just think the tourism world, like every other industry, is looking for, hey, how can we do this cost-effectively for our town, most of our DMOs here are getting tax money from heads and beds, that's how they're surviving. And so I feel like AI is changing the face of people making decisions on travel really at such a fast rate, I can't really keep up with the stats, in fact, I was just trying to look something up for a tourism strategy I'm working on, and I cannot figure it out, there's like four sources that all contradict each other, I think that's how quickly AI is moving, and I feel like that should give us a little bit of pause, and just kind of sit back. And I don't know if you guys all saw LinkedIn, there's a big marketing company, I don't know the name of the company, but they worked in Tennessee, they did a marketing campaign, and they've made a pledge not to use AI in any of the photography. Did you see that? Yes. So that kind of stuff, I think, is going to become really important actually, and maybe that authentic, which is an overused word that I overuse, part of the storytelling that we're all trying to do, is maybe going to be more significant in the future. Maybe the reality is actually going to be more interesting to people. I don't know, AI is one of those things that gives me a little bit of a headache. But then, as you know, I used Read AI on a Zoom call about a year ago, and I was floored at how good it was.

Heidi Schlag: I did see that, yeah, and I've been paying attention to AI as an aid in trip planning, and Jennifer just said they're using it to plan trips. One thing that's been popping up in my newsfeed recently, because I've been clicking on them, is there are a bunch of apps now hitting the marketplace that are AI-generated stories. I've downloaded one just to play with it, and it pops up a map, and it has all of the places pinpointed, and you click on one, and it pops up a history of what it is, that's completely AI-driven. And when I click on sources, it says this was drawn from a variety of sources on the website, so it doesn't even tell you where it came from. So I'm thinking about this as I work with clients, I do encourage them to tell stories and keep it personal, and now there are apps out there that are basically pulling those stories and plunking them into an app that isn't attributing them to anything, which is not a positive way to end this webinar, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how my clients, the smaller heritage organizations, the smaller towns.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Yeah.

Heidi Schlag: Obviously, we want visitors to come have the personal experience, that's the end goal, but AI is now a big factor in whether those visitors even find us in the first place. And I don't know either how all of that's going to shake out.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Yes, yes, unless your visitors are HeidiTown residents and they come to HeidiTown for their information. I, real briefly, all this work I've been doing on the byways, I've talked to enough people, and I've heard time and time again, well, you should just, you know, tell AI to figure this out for you, and I don't, because this is me, and then I'm edited by three people, this is going to be really clean, good information that I hope gives me a good rating with the state of Colorado, and good rating with Google, for being not sloppy, being real good-quality information out there. So I can only hope that kind of stuff will still resonate with people, and, you know, the backlash we're seeing makes me just say to people, slow down a little bit.

Heidi Schlag: Well, this has been a great conversation, thank you so much. If there are any other questions, we have a few minutes if people have questions. And I just want to mention that Lara, who is going to be traveling to Colorado, so we can hear all about her trip to Colorado, on Wednesday, September 2nd at one o'clock, she's going to be my next guest, and she and I will be talking about heritage tourism and outdoor recreation, which we touched on a little bit today also. So I'm looking forward to having Laura join us.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Thank you.

Heidi Schlag: In September, I can't believe we're talking about September. So any last thoughts, Heidi, before we wrap up?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: I just want to thank you so much for doing this, I feel like it's something that I really feel has such a place, and it's almost been a little bit pushed away, like, oh, we're interested in this new shiny thing over here. And in Colorado, I know Laura's going to talk about rec, it's going to be amazing, but in Colorado it's been so rec-oriented that I feel like heritage tourism has sort of been like, you're over there, just get over there in your corner. And so I'm really glad this conversation is happening, and I can't wait for Laura's presentation, because I want to know, I feel like these two things could come together, I haven't seen a ton of that happening, but I would love to see rec figure out how we could get together with heritage tourism and make that collaboration really work for the visitor, for the places. So that's why I would just say thank you so much, and I love this topic, so if anyone wants to continue it with me, I will be more than happy. And if we could ever not do a Zoom and have an in-person meeting, I'm all for it.

Heidi Schlag: Yeah, one day. Well, thank you everyone for joining us, and we hope to see you in September.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer: Thanks, Heidi.

Heidi Schlag: Yep, bye.

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