NATCHEZ — On the heels of a tricentennial celebration and a year of changes in the City of Natchez’s tourism leadership, community leaders have an eye toward the future of the city’s hospitality industry.

Some say Natchez has only scratched the surface when it comes to attracting tourists. While plans are being made for what leaders hope is a community-wide conversation about the future of tourism, leaders say one thing is clear.

“It’s going to take all of us working together,” Natchez Tourism Director Jennifer Ogden Combs said.

The Natchez Convention Promotion Commission and Visit Natchez are hosting a tourism summit today to discuss tourism in Natchez and begin to shape a vision for the future.

The summit is from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. today at the Natchez Convention Center.

Working together

If Natchez is to remain a tourist destination and grow the industry, continuing a unified approach to tourism is the key, Historic Natchez Foundation Executive Director Mimi Miller said.

“I think we have a long way to go to educate the whole community on the value of tourism and have to work harder to make sure everybody benefits from it,” Miller said. “It’s hard for some people to see a direct benefit from it, and we have to work harder on that.”

The city’s garden clubs worked to open the doors to antebellum houses and create a tourism economy, helping Natchez survive while industries that had been open for decades closed, Miller said.

In the same respect, Miller said Natchez has worked in recent years to move tourism beyond historic houses.

“Natchez has done a good job and can do better, but has come light years to broaden tourism, from walking trails and nature tours to much more,” she said. “I think we need to continue in the direction we’re going with a more unified focus, and people really working hard to get along.”

A diverse Natchez

Combs said she is “one of those people who believes we have only scratched the surface.”

“In talking … about strategy going forward, given that last year we had this built-in opportunity with the tricentennial to market and promote us … we had a full year and lots of events, I asked our marketing firm Lou Hammond, ‘How do we wrap our minds about where we go from here?’”

Combs said Lou Hammond representatives told her the company represents tourism destinations around the world, and none of them have ever had a tricentennial from which to build the future of their tourism.

“What it’s done is it has really started to whet the appetite of travel writers and others who are now really curious about this place called Natchez.

“So where do we go from here?”

During the tricentennial, Combs said, Natchez saw the community working together in ways that it never or rarely had in the past.

“We were telling a much further-reaching story and more of Natchez’s story,” she said. “We started working together to tell more of the story, and to me, that’s most important.”

For years, tourism in Natchez has been based on offering tours in historic houses, Natchez National Historical Park Superintendent Kathleen Bond said.

“There’s a certain place for that, but there’s a lot more that you can do in a house than take a tour,” Bond said.

Garden clubs in Natchez have recently explored offering different types of events in historic houses, and as the owner of historic Melrose, Bond said the National Park Service is looking at different ways to utilize the house.

Beyond historic houses, Natchez has a number of new tour operators offering various types of tours, as well as Fort Rosalie, also owned by NPS, which Bond said is a site that can tell different stories and is well suited for living history.

“I think it’s a really exciting time for tourism in Natchez,” Bond said. “I think we are going to have to go boldly where no one has gone before.”

The ideal vision for tourism, Bond said, is a diversified one, with a mixture of historic, cultural and other tourism offerings.

“I think it’s a mixture of what has been an appeal, because there will be people who continue to come for that tradition, but I also think it should include the new music and new restaurant scene and learning to package things so you’re not just promoting yourself.”

It is all of those elements together that draw people to Natchez, Miller said.

“In my experience, people come here for the tapestry of our town,” she said. “Certainly the mansion houses, a picture of Longwood, is going to draw people here. Those houses, they don’t just tell stories of white supremacy. They are stories of immigration, of enslavement, of reconstruction, and we need to make sure these houses tell all those stories.

But it’s also the storefronts downtown, the cottages in the neighborhoods, the African-American history sites. All of these things are why people come here.”

A new vision

New Orleans hotelier Warren Reuther said, “Natchez has everything” a city could hope for to become a top tourist destination.

Reuther’s companies own the Natchez Grand Hotel, a hop-on, hop-off bus tour company, Monmouth Historic Inn and manage the city-owned convention and community centers through a contract with the city.

The key to further development of Natchez’s hospitality industry, Reuther said, is marketing.

“You have the river; you have the antebellum houses; you have the history; you have the convention center,” Reuther said. “It all comes down to marketing. You don’t have to build the river. The homes are there. The history is there. You just need to have people there who know how to market it.”

A community conversation about tourism will hopefully result in a new look at a ways to tell the stories of Natchez’s history, present and future, Bond said.

Specifically, she would like to see tourism opportunities further developed in the areas of heritage tourism, family activities and contemporizing historic spaces.

A way to broaden ideas and think in a new, fresh way about how to tell the city’s history, Bond said, is to involve more young people in the formulation of ways to tell stories and develop tourism products.

“I am not a millennial, and I plan my travel on cell phone or a website,” Bond said. “I think we bring in more young people to help navigate the whole online social and digital world.”

Combs said she, too, believes input from local young people will be a key to the success of tourism in the future.

“I think that’s one of the big things it’s going to take, young people getting involved,” she said. “It’s going to take everybody, people who have financially invested or invested their time in our community, all of our public officials … our amazing volunteers. For me, the most important thing I want to see is us continuing to work together and in support of each other … and in support of Natchez.

“Marketing is very important. Our marketing department can market and do social media and advertising, but we also have to be sure what we as a community provide to a visitor or conventioneers or just a person driving through town, that what we’re providing is the very best experience. I think we set a very high standard for ourselves, and I think that’s going to be very important going forward.”