I’ve had the honor and privilege of working at the Vail Valley Partnership for the past seven years. It’s an honor and privilege, as the Partnership is built around the concept of regional collaboration and working with the entire community. In fact, I started shortly after the organization re-branded from the Vail Valley Chamber & Tourism Bureau to the Vail Valley Partnership.
We’ve made great progress in the past few years in adding benefits and value to our members, increasing our destination tourism impacts & increasing our economic development programs. And we are thinking even bigger as we look ahead to 2013. We’re thinking big and plan to make an even bigger impact on our member businesses and the entire Vail Valley community by focusing our efforts on economic development on a regional scale. This includes traditional chamber of commerce benefits (more benefits than any chamber in Colorado outside of Denver) and traditional tourism bureau efforts (our group sales & event recruiting efforts far outshine any other in the mountain region). Both of these are directly tied to regional economic development efforts as tourism is our key industry and providing value & services to the business community gives small businesses additional tools and cost savings programs to increase their efficiencies.
Stepping back to the Vail Valley Partnership and our efforts, “partnership” is a powerful word, and in practice it is an extremely difficult and lofty goal for a community organization to live up to. Partnership is defined as “a relationship between individuals or groups that is characterized by mutual cooperation and responsibility, as for the achievement of a specified goal.”
It’s taken us a few years to build into the “Partnership” name. The Vail Valley Partnership has made great strides over the past few years to better position the Partnership in the community and the feedback we receive on a daily basis from members, stakeholders and municipal partners validates these strides. We recognize the trust our members and partners place in us and we are thankful and mindful to provide tangible return on that investment.
This matches the exact purpose of the Vail Valley Partnership. While we fulfill the chamber and tourism bureau roles in the community, our goal isn’t just to be the “chamber of commerce” or the “tourism bureau”. Our goal, to best serve the community and our municipal stakeholders, is to provide resources and tools to increase economic opportunities in the community and to provide a return to our partners by supporting the business community via chamber programs, increasing destination tourism through our destination sales role and working on regional economic development programs to help make Eagle County a great place to do business.
More specifically, as we move forward into 2013 the programming of The Partnership will include:
Our membership renewal packets are being sent to all current members this week. We hope our current members continue to find value in our programming and benefits.If your business is not a member of the Partnership, we invite you to take another look at membership. We’re much more than the “chamber and tourism bureau” of days past. Our programming is much stronger than you might remember, and opportunities for individual businesses to participate in our regional success via signature programs and marketing benefits have been expanded. Maybe most importantly, we are focused on taking a leadership position to drive economic activity to Eagle County.
The Vail Valley Partnership remains a membership-based organization and invite you to join the Partnership to help us achieve regional success (our base level membership starts at just $1 per day). We’re all in it together and invite you to partner with us.