Familiarization pays off for Valley tourism

In the next few months, there will be a lot of visitors coming through the Mat-Su Valley, but for a few of these, it’s anything but a vacation.

Familiarization tours, or FAMs, are an important part of a convention and visitor bureau’s effort to grow tourism. Here in the Valley, the Mat-Su CVB hosts FAM tours for media and for tour operators regularly in the summer, often working with the Alaska Travel Industry Association (ATIA) on the Mat-Su Valley component for a statewide tour.

CVB members, and members of ATIA, offer these tour operators deeply discounted and often complimentary, tours. This is an investment that often pays big dividends in the future, not only for the business hosting the FAM, but also for the Mat-Su Borough as a whole.

A great example of how a FAM trip benefits the Valley is an upcoming trip that features eight national tour operators who will spend two days in the Valley as part of a six-day tour of Alaska. The process started during the National Tour Association convention when I met with several of these operators to highlight potential products they could feature in their Alaska tour offerings. A year later, they are in Alaska, touring the state to experience it firsthand and to further develop their tour packages.

This particular group is stopping for lunch at a roadhouse on the Glenn Highway, visiting the Iditarod headquarters in Wasilla, jet boat touring and flightseeing in Talkeetna, overnighting at a hotel in Talkeetna and enjoying breakfast and lunch at two different restaurants, before heading north to Denali National Park and finally, Fairbanks. In six days, they’ll have been to the Kenai Peninsula, Valdez, Anchorage, the Mat-Su Valley, Denali and Fairbanks, making their time very precious — and the window for impressing them very narrow.

Mat-Su CVB members are hosting their experiences here for free. Why? Because each of the operators on the FAM sell a lot of Alaska tour packages in the Lower 48 and Canada, and if their experience on a particular tour was exciting and fun, they’ll probably include it in their national packages. So a $300 flightseeing trip that was offered for free to a tour operator ultimately pays off in thousands of dollars in future group tour bookings through that operator’s office.

Those future bookings obviously benefit the individual business. But it also benefits our community’s economy as a whole. While on the tour put together by an operator who was on the FAM trip, a visitor will eat meals in local restaurants, spend money on souvenirs and overnight here, which in turn generates bed tax revenue for the Mat-Su Borough. It creates jobs, which leads to payroll being spent throughout the Valley by these employees.

A FAM trip is far from a free ride in an airplane, a discounted experience or a cheap meal. It’s a very important investment into the future of the tourism industry in the Mat-Su Valley.

Casey Ressler (casey@alaskavisit.com) is the Mat-Su CVB marketing and communications manager.