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Making Tourist Attractions
for Towns and Small Cities
by Lenny Everson
This is a book of suggestions, thoughts, and ideas.
It is intended to help towns and small cities attract people from outside the local area, to improve the local economy and maintain the viability of the downtown core.
If you're connected with a town or a small city, steal five bucks from the coffee fund and send for one of these. If you share the ideas here with other people, you'll stimulate discussion and generate even more ideas. If you keep it to yourself, you'll come across as a person of wisdom and ambition!
This book should be required reading for all Downtown Improvement Associations.
8.5 x 11 22 pages ISBN 0-9737351-9-8 CIP
Saddle-Stitch Binding $5
Sample
Clean Toilets
People are going to come to your town looking for something, and you want to provide that something.
You’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) to learn how many people will avoid downtowns just because of the difficulty of finding toilets, especially good clean toilets.
There’s always a toilet at Tim Horton’s, and McDonald’s or Wendy’s will provide services. But in many towns these are on the outskirts and so don’t move people downtown.
You want people downtown.
There are toilets downtown; you know that. But they’re part of commercial restaurants and bars, and Canadians feel guilty about using them for free. Not to mention the fact that they’re often downstairs and difficult for seniors to reach. And not always that clean.
No, you need to have a good, free, clean toilet available to the people who visit your town. Toilets that are accessible to handicapped people.
Don’t set up a freestanding public toilet. Even if you could afford to keep it clean, nobody would believe it was clean. Most public toilets are not places any of your three target audiences would want to enter. The few that are good and clean are attached to things like tourist information centers, which are open only limited hours.
In Europe, people pay a fee to use the toilets and they’re kept clean by attendants. But this isn’t Europe, and people are a bit illogical about those things over here.
Have one of the restaurants or hotels (or whatever) provide proper toilets. Give them a tax break as long as they do so to your standards. And for heaven’s sake, advertise the toilets as being free and public and clean.
Lack of good toilets is a major disincentive to visiting a town. Kids always need to go pee, as do older men and women, and neither of these groups likes to feel obligated to buy another lunch just to do so.
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