Johnson City celebrates National Travel & Tourism Week

[Music] today we're here at downtown Johnson City not the prettiest days outside but it's always a great time to be in downtown Johnson City and right now I'm joined by Jenna more with visit Johnson City and this is national travel and tourism week and there's you know normally

there'd be a lot of stuff going on outdoors here but having to go to the virtual world a little bit yeah you know normally this is gym we're just starting to get into like peak event season and things are a lot different this year so where we normally

go and actually interact with our folks coming through at welcome centers we've taken to social media pretty much to promote our community and try to stay top of mind as people are potentially starting to look at traveling in the semi near future and you want to keep Johnson

City on the forefront of people's minds and then their all their travel itineraries absolutely and that's actually one thing we're working on right now we're gonna be launching some itineraries on our website soon and we've actually reached out to locals to help us create an itinerary so on

our Facebook page you know there's a survey where we're saying hey if you got 24 hours in Johnson City where are you going to eat lunch breakfast dinner you know you've got time for one outdoor activity where are you going and then we're gonna compile all those and

make an itinerary that we're gonna promote to outsiders and our goal here is to like you know have our community help us promote where we live and where we love and eventually bring those folks in that are you know just looking for a long weekend getaway or visiting

family nearby I love that idea because who knows better what's going on around Johnson City than the folks that live here that's right and some people are like I don't want to give away our secret spot so we'll see how many people will let on to the to

the secrets give away those secret spot yes come on help us out that's exactly right and also you're doing a lot of something with restaurants you're giving away some gift cards the entire month of May yeah so we actually launched that during tourism week so it seemed like

an appropriate time and since restaurants are opening you know with limited capacity and certain restrictions so we've partnered with Bank of Tennessee and we're gonna be giving a hundred dollars in local gift cards away every week through the month of May and so we thought this could be

a good way again to involve locals and potentially folks from other places and have people talking about local restaurants you know where do you love to and then tagging people and hopefully just kind of spreading the message about eating local tourism you know during this pandemic and tourism

to have courses going down but it's going to come back and we want to make sure that it comes back in a big way here at downtown Johnson City yeah definitely and that's kind of you know it's been a little touchy like how do you keep promoting whenever

we're not encouraging travel yet but we still want to be on people's minds and we want them to be going through our website or social media to get travel inspiration so when they're ready you know we'll have all the assets here and and the hospitality ready to welcome

them if somebody wants to take part in that survey or they want to get registered for the gift cards how do they go about doing that so I would just go to our Facebook page which if you just type in visit Johnson City we've got the gift card

post actually pinned to the top of that page so you can enter and actually the survey we're trying to get all the answers in by the end of the day so I can create it and it can get posted within a week or so on our website all

right things starting to reopen things are starting to come back a little bit yeah just need to take it easy take it safe that's right absolutely and remember social distancing that's exactly right Jenna thanks for taking the time with us today folks national travel and tourism week happening

in Johnson City they want you to be a part of it take that survey get involved in let everybody know just how great downtown Johnson City is