Workshop comes up with lots of ideas to attract tourists
Wednesday February 17, 2010
Cobar Business Association president (and Cobar Shire councillor) Michael Cox
speaking at the Tourism Think Tank workshop on Saturday afternoon at the Cobar
Bowling and Golf Club.
“There’s a lot of good ideas to come out of this workshop and if we did every single one, tourists wouldn’t have to go anywhere else.”
This was the summary of Mark Workman who facilitated a Tourism Think Tank workshop organised by the Cobar Business Association at the Cobar Bowling and Golf Club on Saturday afternoon.
The three hour workshop was well attended by a cross section of members of the local community and included direct providers of services to tourists as well as residents and councillors who could see the indirect benefits that an increase in tourism can have on our town.
The meeting first determined Cobar’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in relation to tourism.
A large and diverse number of tourism ideas were discussed and the most popular ideas allocated to short term and long term lists of goals for Cobar.
The meeting’s short term goals were to improve the local knowledge of Cobar’s customer service staff; create an event organiser’s handbook; to resurrect the local radio station; to plan a big event such as a Skins event at the pool; to have more uniform signage for tourists visiting Cobar and to plan three day itineraries for visitors to town.
Among the long term tourism goals were extensions to the caravan park; developing the museum and creating a mining park; opening a nocturnal zoo; creating and erecting large posters using historical local images; having a large annual event such as a rodeo or music festival and attracting a McDonalds or KFC franchise to town.
The three most popular ideas (caravan park, museum and nocturnal zoo) were chosen by the group as long term goals that they would work towards in the future.
Cobar Business Association president Michael Cox said a lot of “very productive and very good ideas” came out of the meeting.
“There was also a lot of energy and enthusiasm and a commitment shown to go forward which is very positive,” he said.
Next story | News home
