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Weekly UpdatesEver thought about visiting Alaska's Playground? How about stopping by Alaska's Emerald Isle or Alaska's Peak Experience or seeing what Winter Fun/Midnight Sun is all about? Maybe you just want to get a Big Wild Life.
You're not alone. In 2006, 1.63 million people visited Alaska, according to the Alaska Visitor Statistics Program, and almost all of them visited the Kenai Peninsula, Kodiak, Juneau, Fairbanks or Anchorage.
"People want to see mountains, glaciers and wildlife, not necessarily in that order," says Dave Worrell, communications director for the Alaska Travel Industry Association. "It is that pristine wilderness where you can see untrammeled mountains and experience seeing wildlife in their native habitat, glaciers, glaciers calving.... Year after year, survey after survey, that's what people tell us they want for their Alaska experience."
With so much to see and so little time, most visitors opt for a weeklong visit, most aboard a cruise ship. According to Worrell, Americans tend to take the shortest vacations in the industrialized nations. "A seven-day cruise is a very efficient way to see Alaska," he says.
But, if they're on a cruise ship, visitors aren't spending much money in Alaska's cities. The goal of convention and visitors centers and some chambers of commerce around the state is to lure those visitors, as well as independent travelers, to their towns by emphasizing their unique assets.
Depending on their staffing and budgets, Alaska CVBs use a combination of print and electronic media to get the word out, with increasing emphasis on interactive capabilities of the Internet. They also work with cruise and bus lines and try to coordinate with travel writers and other media outlets to showcase their areas. Other venues include trade shows in Alaska and on the West Coast.
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ATIA, with a $10 million annual budget, markets Alaska as a whole by publishing the official state of Alaska vacation planner. It also operates www.travelaska.com.
JUNEAU ROCKS
Juneau, the capital city, is the top visitor destination in the state, according to the state survey, with about 63 percent of total visitors. The lure is its beauty.
"The combination of water, mountains, rainforest, whales and glaciers in such close proximity is hard to find anywhere else," Lorene Palmer, president of the Juneau CVB, wrote. "The scenic beauty is always the top reason cited by visitors."
Palmer says more than 1 million people will visit Juneau this year, approximately 980,000 on cruise ships. Her biggest task is to get them off the ships to participate in the many activities Juneau has to offer.
The Juneau CVB uses a multifaceted approach to getting the word out, focusing on online marketing and its Web site, www.traveljuneau.com, distributing the Juneau travel guide, placing travel stories in various publications, as well as attending trade shows on the West Coast and working with the cruise lines.
ANCHORAGE, TOO
Anchorage is the second-most-popular destination in Alaska, with about 840,000 visitors annually.
Most visitors to Anchorage came into Alaska via a cruise ship. "Anchorage is their most popular add-on trip," says Nance Larsen, vice president of the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau communications and marketing program.
Anchorage's attraction is that it combines the amenities of a city, but in a wilderness setting with six mountain ranges nearby, a major national park in the backyard and moose walking through city streets.
"It's accessible to everything," Larsen says.
ACVB uses a multimedia marketing approach, and Larsen says the bureau is putting a lot of emphasis on its Internet presence. In fact, if it had more money, Larsen says ACVB would put it toward new interactive technologies on the Internet.
"That's the vehicle that everyone is using, even the older more mature generation," she says. "They're watching video, they're doing interactive things."
The average visitor stays 2.5 nights in Anchorage, but Larsen says the ACVB is trying to have visitors extend their stay to four nights by emphasizing the number and variety of activities in Alaska's largest city.
The ACVB is also putting a larger focus on visitors from Germany, Korea, China and Japan.
"That's a different kind of travel customer," Larsen says. "They stay longer, they spend more, they plan more and they tend to do things that are a little more off the beaten path."
Anchorage also has an entire division devoted to group travel, but keeps its emphasis on the idea that "in the end, whether or not you're a convention delegate and you come here, you're still an independent traveler."
FISHING KENAI
Fishing is the lure of the Kenai Peninsula, but Mya Renken, executive director of the Kenai Convention and Visitors Bureau, and other tourism groups on the Peninsula are working to get out the message that there's more to the Kenai than salmon, halibut and Dolly Varden.
There's its history, for instance. Capt. James Cook spent 10 days in the area in 1778 and the Russians followed, settling in Kenai in 1781. "Kenai is older than most cities on the West Coast," Renken says.
She is touting the city of Kenai area as a place to base a vacation, with a central location that enables visitors to unpack and explore the rest of the peninsula. "You can travel 40 to 45 miles and be in a whole different ecosystem," she says.
Kenai's small size and lack of glittery tourism amenities is another boon. Visitors to Kenai want to meet real Alaskans, she says. In addition, many Alaskans vacation on the Peninsula, hence the slogan "Alaska's Playground," created by the Kenai Peninsula Tourism Marketing Council.
It's a concept Renken embraces. "Travel in your own backyard," she says. "That's what we try to tell Alaskans."
VALDEZ POTENTIAL
That's a message Valdez CVB Executive Director David Petersen takes to heart. A lot of people from Fairbanks visit the city on Prince William Sound to fish and hike during the summer and ski during winter months.
Alaskans know about Valdez, but Petersen says one of his biggest problems is getting the message to Outside markets that Valdez is a desirable place to visit.
"Probably the biggest misconception is that we're just a big oil town, that we're not a big tourist town," he says.
Valdez is the terminal for the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and was thrust into the national consciousness by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Petersen focuses marketing efforts on the town's scenic beauty and proximity to Prince William Sound. The word is getting out.
In 2008, Princess Cruises' The Tahitian Princess has eight ports of call scheduled for Valdez. The ship, which carries 700 passengers, is one of the smaller ones in Princess' fleet, Petersen says,
"That's a pretty good fit for Valdez," he says. "If we had one of the 2,000 passenger boats, we'd be pretty maxed out."
INTERIOR DRAW
Interior Alaska lacks the vistas of ocean, mountains and glaciers of coastal areas, and Outside perceptions of Alaska's inaccessibility, cold and dark are especially common. But, in the case of Fairbanks, the latter two are also an asset.
People who visit Fairbanks want to experience both the midnight sun and the aurora borealis, according to Karen Lundquist of the Fairbanks CVB. "These features differentiate us from other worldwide destinations, except for a limited few in the circumpolar north," she wrote.
However, visitors can't see the aurora in the summer because the 24-hour daylight washes out the displays. Several Fairbanks businesses feature winter attractions, such as ice carving, aurora borealis shows and sled dog demonstrations. One business also gives visitors the opportunity to step into a freezer to see what temperatures of 40 degrees below zero really feel like.
"We look at winter as the 'opportunity season,' not the off-season," Lundquist says. "We have great success with Condor flights from Germany in the summer and with JAL flights from Japan in the winter."
Fairbanks' gold history and the region's rich Alaska Native culture are another draw. About 392,000 people visited Fairbanks in 2006, according to state statistics.
"Once people are here, they are eager to meet 'real' Alaskans and are curious about how we thrive in this location," Lundquist says. The Fairbanks CVB incorporates 'Authentic Alaskan' spokespeople into its Web site and publications to convey snapshots of their lifestyles.
"We are just in the process of starting a blog, which will be a place for the FCVB to display video/audio/photo essays, as well as a place for comments to be posted," she says.
QUIET BETHEL
In remoter parts of the state, such as Bethel, tourism is still in its infancy.
Bethel doesn't have a CVB and its Chamber of Commerce is mostly volunteer. Administrative assistant Bonnie Bradbury is paid a stipend to take care of the chamber's mailings and other business.
She says Bethel, as a community, hasn't bought into tourism as an industry.
"There really hasn't been the full excitement about it," she says. Instead, the chamber focuses on getting people who visit the regional hub for conventions to stay an extra day or two for fishing or birdwatching.
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A day or two, or even a week or two in Alaska is only long enough to experience a fraction of what the state has to offer.
"There's so much beauty in the state and so much variety in the state that you can't really see it all in one trip," says Kenai's Renken.
It's time to plan your next visit to the Last Frontier.
SAMPLE OF CVBS ACROSS STATE
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