Visitors Center to open in Ruckersville

A new tourist center will open on Route 29 South in Ruckersville within weeks.
The Greene County Visitors’ Center, now located on Spotswood Trail in Stanardsville, will relocate to the bright yellow building next to the Blue Ridge Café by mid-July, confirms Margaret Ramsey, speaking for the county’s tourism council.
With the move, the Visitors’ Center is in the direct path of the tens of thousand of motor vehicles that pass through Greene County along Route 29, not far from its intersection with Route 33.
Eventually, says Ramsey, there will be signs for the Visitors Center at all four corners of that intersection.
Local leaders expect the new and improved location to boost efforts to strengthen the area’s budding tourism industry. 
The purpose of a tourism center is to provide visitors with information on the area’s attractions and lodgings, and with items relevant to tourism, such as maps.
Presently, travelers seeking information on local attractions and such have had to travel Route 33 West down to the bypass, where they were “off the beaten path,“ says Ramsey.
“We haven’t had the best location,“ she explains. “Route 29 is where the traffic is.“
The new location puts Greene in a better position to “catch travelers and encourage them to consider options (here) instead of traveling on to destinations such as Massanutten or Charlottesville,“ says Ramsey.
She says that Greene has been losing tourist dollars to adjacent counties because of the lack of exposure for “unique shops, restaurants, accommodations and other services” available in the county.
To ensure that those losses are kept to a minimum in the future, the county’s economic development authority has contracted with a professional consultant named John Humphries. Ramsey describes Humphries as “well versed in the business of tourism. He will begin managing the Visitors’ Center in early July,“ she says.
Among other things, Humphries will be working with county tourism-related businesses and attractions by gathering information about them and disseminating that information to those who stop by the Visitors’ Center.
He will also recruit, train, and manage a staff of volunteers.
Once up and running, she explains, the Visitors’ Center will stock brochures for and offer information on local attractions.
But Greene County residents will find it useful as well.
“We focus on local information to share with tourists,“ explains Ramsey. “But because the Greene County Visitors Center is a certified state visitors’ center, we will be offering information on tourist attractions throughout Virginia.“
State certification does more than require visitors centers to have information on other areas: “It also requires visitors’ centers across the state, and the 10 Welcome Centers in the Commonwealth, to have information on Greene,“ says Ramsey.
And, as a result of certification, “Greene is (a county) we market on the state level,“ says Tamra Talmadge-Anderson, director of public relations for the Virginia Tourism Corporation (VTC).
Further, certification allows the county to apply for state grants designed to assist in encouraging tourism. It also allows the county the right to publicize its local activities on VTC’s website at no charge. Examples of those activities include the county fair, the Battle of Stanardsville reenactment, and local wine and food festivals.
It also allows tourism-related businesses list themselves on the VTC website under headings such as: where to stay; vacation homes and rentals; resorts; hotels and motels; things to do; shopping; history and heritage; and activities.
Tourist centers themselves can be extremely beneficial to communities, adds Talmadge-Anderson.
“They help travelers to extend their stay in an area and make the most of local and regional tourism destinations,“ she says.
The latest expenditure figures available from VTC end with the year 2007. That year, records indicate that travelers in Greene spent $14,435,882 directly on such tourism-related services as meals, lodging, public transportation, auto transportation, shopping, admissions and entertainment.
Greene’s tourism council would like them to spend a whole lot more, and Ramsey is asking individuals for help in getting them to do so.
“We’d like the volunteers who created and manned the old Visitors’ Center together to stay with us,“ she says. “They put a lot of hard work into creating a wonderful, welcoming environment and we would like to maintain that character.“
“And we’d also like some new volunteers,“ she adds.
A meeting for anyone interested in becoming a volunteer is scheduled for Wednesday, July 1 at 10:30 a.m. at the Blue Ridge Café