City wins honors from tourism group By Tiffany Ray Montgomery Advertiser

Late last year the Montgomery Area Convention & Visitor Bureau launched a marketing campaign to promote Montgomery as a tourist destination, drawing on its civil rights history, the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail and other assets. The effort has not gone unnoticed. The organization has been named a Convention and Visitors Bureau of the Year by the Southeast Tourism Society, a nonprofit group representing travel-related companies, among others. The Montgomery Area Convention & Visitor Bureau was chosen for the award from among visitors bureaus with budgets of more than $1 million in 11 Southeastern states. The Southeast Tourism Society cited Montgomery's focus on civil rights and other historic attractions in its marketing campaign, including next year's 50th-anniversary celebration of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The STS also awarded the Alabama Bureau of Tourism & Travel the Public Sector Organization of the Year for a recent "Year of the Alabama Gardens" promotional campaign that included simultaneous walking tours in more than 30 towns, as well as television advertising. The campaign helped increase traffic in hotels and other tourism-related destinations statewide, according to the STS. "Alabama had a pretty good sweep," Lee Sentell, director of the state bureau, said this week at an afternoon event at Union Station celebrating the awards. Montgomery's Convention & Visitor Bureau developed the new marketing campaign -- centered on the slogan, "Montgomery: Courageous, Visionary, Rebellious" -- based on a market study commissioned in 2002. In 2003, the city increased its funding to the bureau by 17 percent. Carl Barranco, chairman of the Montgomery Area Chamber of Commerce, said the Capital City is a "sparking constellation of history and attractions" and called the city's tourism industry a "sleeping giant."According to the visitors bureau, Montgomery ranked second only to the Gulf Coast in key tourism-related economic performance indicators in 2003, when Montgomery saw a 9 percent increase in tourism job growth and a 7 percent increase in travel-related earnings over the prior year. So far this year, the Convention & Visitor Bureau has reported a 600 percent increase in visitor inquiries over the same period last year. Mayor Bobby Bright, who attended the awards ceremony in Atlanta last weekend, said Monday that Montgomery is "on the grow. We're doing things we haven't done in many, many years." He added that the boycott celebration, planned for next year, will bring national attention to the city and will "bring people together."