Ulysses Prize and Awards Acceptance
Speech Madrid, Spain
Dr. Robert D. Billington
United Nations World Tourism Organization
June 1, 2006
A very good day Secretary-General Francesco Frangialli, Dr. Eduardo
Fayos-Sola, Ms. Joaquin Lequina Herran, distinguished members of the
audience, ladies and gentlemen. Congratulations to Dr. David Airey and
Accor on their awards this wonderful day. Greetings from the United
States.
The entire Blackstone Valley Tourism Council family is humbled by the
recognition of our work in destination management, and we are especially
pleased to be honored as the first destination management organization
to receive the prestigious Ulysses Award. Tourism practitioners look to
the UNWTO to set high standards for tourism developers to aspire. To be
recognized for our programs is certainly important to the future of
developing sustainable tourism, not just in our Valley, but also in our
state and our nation. A new standard for tourism in the United States
has now been established.
When Dr. Eduardo Fayos-Sola, Head of Education and Knowledge
Management, called on behalf of the Secretary-General of the World
Tourism Organization, with the news that the Blackstone Valley Tourism
Council would be honored with the Ulysses Award for Innovation in
Tourism Destination Management, a wave of excitement immediately
overtook our staff, and then the feeling of new responsibility to a
larger world of tourism development, became apparent. Our sense is that
when an organization is recognized for its work, it comes with greater
scrutiny for its future projects, and an increased responsibility to
share its knowledge with others.
I was asked to recall in my remarks today, a bit about the Blackstone
Valley Tourism Council and its style of developing tourism as an
instrument for regeneration for over 20 years. The Blackstone Valley
Tourism Council was founded at a time when the unemployment rate in our
state was 14%, and although the Valley had an important history in
America, a rich mix of cultures, and a river with an important heritage,
there was no organized movement to use these benefits for positive
community change. A few pioneers however, considered tourism as a
possible solution to some of the problems in our community. The Tourism
Council took on the challenges and became an entrepreneurial destination
management organization interested in taking the tired Blackstone Valley
through the community tourism regeneration process. The Council became
involved in what we call: “place-making,” in the New England region of
the United States. The Valley is situated about 35 Kilometers South of
Boston, Massachusetts, three hours by car North of New York City, and
has a large East Coast interstate highway traversing the middle of the
Valley, so it did have near-by markets but was not tapping them.
People who work in tourism development are most interested in how
tourism creates positive changes for the communities they serve. The
Blackstone Valley Tourism Council models this behavior and we immerse
the organization in a process of continued renewal and improvement, to
make us more competitive to achieve excellence our destination’s
development. Receiving recognition for this type of work is rarely a
consideration.
Our not-for-profit, tourism planning, development and promotional
agency began its work in 1985 with a $300 donation from a Rhode Island
state senator who wanted to help get a “good idea” underway. The idea
was the creation of an organization that would use leadership,
imagination, determination and creativity to accomplish goals to change
their world through tourism. Thus began the odyssey to create a
destination in a Valley that was host to the first polluted river in
America. It did have the superlative however, of being the Birthplace of
the American Industrial Revolution, with the construction in 1790 of the
first successful water-powered, cotton-spinning factory in America.
The textile industry grew from there, following the textiles, came
the machine, automobile and jewelry industries. America became a world
industrial power, and thousands of people from all over the world
immigrated to the Blackstone Valley to work in the mills. After one
hundred and fifty years of economic success, our factories began to grow
silent, organized labor and expensive electrical power, drove jobs to
the south, and many of the 1000 mills and the villages industry
constructed in the Blackstone Valley were abandoned and began to decay.
Morale of our residents sank, the image of the Blackstone Valley as a
place of American industriousness eroded to one of depressed villages,
economic decay, loss of direction as a community and the legacy of a
heavily polluted landscape and river.
Our work began with the creation of an organization to lead the tourism
development effort in the Blackstone Valley. This non-profit
organization was to be led by a volunteer Board of Directors, many of
which are still with us today, providing single-minded leadership. A
tourism development plan was written and presented to the Blackstone
Valley communities. It took more than a year of public meetings, but
eventually all communities adopted the plan for tourism development.
Many had questions about the need for a tourism council because as they
said, "visitors do not come here." In 1986, a year after the formation
of the Tourism Council, the Rhode Island State Legislature wrote the
Council into state law assigning responsibility for tourism development
in 9 Valley communities. The Blackstone Valley became a 241 square-mile
destination based on shared history, culture and our unique watershed.
In 1988, the Blackstone Valley National Heritage Corridor Commission,
a unit of the US National Park Service, adopted the Tourism Council's
strategy of place-making through tourism development. The Tourism
Council has worked for the past 18 years as an agent of the National
Heritage Corridor Commission, as well as city and state governments,
implementing plans, projects and programs to affect large-scale
community change. The management of government funds brought us the
expertise to work under the scrutiny and adherence to intense government
fiscal procedures and policies.
It took five years of speeches, presentations, and programs after the
Council's incorporation, to get doubters to stop laughing about the
Blackstone Valley becoming a destination, and to think that tourism
might actually be a tool of community change. By 1990 the Tourism
Council was raising funds to build the first riverboat to cruise the
Blackstone River since 1848. Despite the idea that there was nothing to
see along the Blackstone River, the fund-raising campaign was successful
and the boat was launched in 1993. This once heavily polluted, and foul
smelling river, was now going to have a tour boat to ply its waters and
educate about positive community change. Since it’s launching, nearly
300,000 people have toured the Blackstone River on the riverboat The
Blackstone Valley Explorer.
This element of tangible infrastructure helped the Tourism Council
learn how to, not only raise funds, but also raise the profile as our
organization that primarily worked with the intangible aspects of the
Valley. Since that time the Council has designed two more 49-passenger
ferryboats, The Hope and The Renaissance were constructed for the
Tourism Council on the Mississippi River. These boats worked under
contract for the Rhode Island and Federal Highway Administration in an
effort to implement mass transportation by water, to the Blackstone
River Valley.
In 1994, the Tourism Council began a twinning relationship. It was
based on the shared industrial history between the Amber Valley of
England and the Blackstone Valley of the US. The world’s industrial
revolution began in England in the 1700’s, but in 1790, an English
immigrant exported his knowledge of textile production through secrecy,
to the States. This twinning became our basis in international tourism
with Europe.
The Blackstone Valley had a navigational canal heritage, albeit a
short one of 20 years, and remnants remained since closing in 1848. For
the Millennium celebration, a British Canal Boat The Samuel Slater,
constructed in Cambridgeshire, England, was imported as a floating
reminder of our important Blackstone Valley Canal heritage. The Council
also operates the riverboat Spirit of the Blackstone Valley, now used
expressly to carry handicapped passengers through the state's largest
art installation called Waterfire. To further our transportation
initiative, the Tourism Council imported and operated a traditional 78-
passenger British-built, double-deck bus and operated a
traditional-style 33-passenger trolley. All helped to build the
familiarity of the Tourism Council, all were handicapped accessible and
generated operational funds to be placed back into our programs.
Today the Blackstone Valley is going through another revolution.
However, this revolution is not about the water-powered textile
factories, it is a revolution of people reclaiming their landscape,
river, and built environment, to create positive community change
through implementing sustainable tourism development principles.
The Council is now focusing its work on more riverfront development,
the development of cultural events, operating a floating bed and
breakfast, directing a one-day, 1,200 person motorcoach tour for
residents, managing two visitor information centers, increasing
profitability of the Blackstone Valley's visitor resources, affiliating
with the Keep America Beautiful program to continue the clean-up and
green-up the Blackstone Valley by creating a healthy landscape,
increasing river education programs for younger audiences and creating
new, visitor programs for our over 55 years of age Elderhostel groups,
and of course, working to expand international relationships.
The Blackstone Valley Tourism Council is a small organization with a
large mission and has just approved its 23rd Annual Budget. This fiscal
year, the Tourism Council is turning its attention to the work of
developing and adopting a sustainable tourism development plan for the
State of Rhode Island, which will begin with a conference on
VolunTourism on June 27.
While the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council has written a proposal
for statewide sustainable tourism development in 2005, we look to the
UNWTO for leadership and expertise in tourism sustainability, governance
and tourism policy, as we work to make Rhode Island more attractive to
residents and visitors, and to make our state the first sustainable
tourism state in the United States.
The Council would like to share what is has learned from our
successes and our failures with other destinations around the world,
through the Sustainable Tourism Planning and Development Laboratory by
showing the application of the principles of tourism destination
development. This recognition today will help the Blackstone Valley
Tourism Council speak even more clearly about excellence in destination
management. Our Tourism Laboratory uses the Blackstone River Valley as
an experiential learning environment where sustainable tourism
principles are practiced, experimented with and implemented. The
continuous work on design and implementation of programs for the
achievement of tourism excellence in the industrialized Blackstone
Valley make it an ideal location for this type of study. The goal is to
share the concepts and strategies that have regenerated the Blackstone
Valley and urge them to be replicated anywhere in the world.
This recognition will strengthen how our colleagues in government and
the private tourism industry perceive tourism. We plan to employ further
the principles of the UNWTO to assist the US tourism industry to learn
to expect even more corporate and government responsibility in their
work.
The Tourism Council will continue to seek excellence, by continuing
to improve its policies, procedures and programs in destination
management. Again, this recognition and future collaborations with the
UNWTO, increases our responsibility to tourism worldwide.
In closing, I would like to thank my children and my wife JoAnne, who
has traveled with me as I receive this honor on behalf of the Blackstone
Valley Tourism Council, and thank her for her years of support as the
Tourism Council was brought along from its infancy. I thank my very
dedicated staff of professionals, some of who have been supporting me
for over 18 years, and I thank my long-time supportive Board of
Directors, especially my Chairman who has taught me so much about
tourism development.
The Blackstone Valley Tourism Council admires and respects greatly
the work of the UNWTO. This award is considered a milestone in our
history and will take a place of honor in our tourism headquarters in
Rhode Island. The World Tourism Organization recognizing our work
humbles us. We look forward to sharing this wonderful experience today,
and taking the message of the UNWTO to our colleagues in the US and look
to working even more closely with your agency in the future.
Thank you so much for this recognition and good day.