As a child, two of the worst days of the whole year were the last day of family vacation followed closely by the last day of summer vacation.
As the sun set I vividly remember not wanting the day to end. One more ball game with my friends, one more cast of the fishing rod, one last dive into the pool, and one last evening on the lake pier watching the sky go from orange to blue to black.
Oh, to bottle up the nostalgia and recapture it. More on that later.
Our work at the Grand Island Convention and Visitors Bureau involves service, marketing and branding. Travel is a process that starts long before you toss your luggage into the trunk. When the question of where we go this summer or for family vacation in 2022, we want Grand Island to be a part of their thought process and conversation.
Personally, I still love to peruse travel books, magazines and visitor guides to prepare for my next adventure. I’m also a map guy — not the kind on my phone (although I use that regularly). I like the kind of map you fold, so you can see the big picture. Batteries never run out on a paper map!
Back to the bottled-up nostalgia. Yo.City, the tech start-up founded by Jon Rhoades and Jeremy Heeg here in Grand Island, has developed an idea that helps with that notion of bottling up sunsets. Currently being beta tested and it works something like this: Users download the phone app and travel their town collecting images, videos and the like and collect points for their efforts. The images begin to promote attractions to other users, creating a desire to explore. Yo.City bridges the gap between tourism and economic development in that it encourages locals to explore their own town.
Inserting our destination into traveler’s planning and dreaming process is a powerful tool. It’s too early to say what if anything will come from the Yo.City app. I can assure you the local developers grinding away in the Yo.City skunkworks coding, changing and drafting new iterations of the app, will lead to serious traffic for businesses in small out of the way towns and destinations.
Grow Grand Island has supported Rhoades in his entrepreneurial efforts to connect tech-minded people, encourage collaboration and launch businesses in our area.
Another example of collaboration includes the Chamber of Commerce digitally distributing its local passport program. Jon added that functionality to the Grand Island Vibe phone app. This partnership promoted local businesses through the shop local program.
Why mention this? There are amazing collaborations going on in Grand Island right now. I know, I know, I started out this column eschewing the use of a battery to plan, but they are where most people live. The old travel magazine has been largely replaced by the phone app.
Digital is where people live, when they are not sitting, unplugged, listening to the waves lapping on the last day of vacation.
