The Liberty County Convention and Visitors Bureau recently hosted a familiarization tour in July with visitor-information specialists from the Georgia Visitors Centers in Savannah and Kingsland.
The familiarization tour was to give employees from the centers an opportunity to explore other regions of the state, so that they can speak knowledgeably to tourists about those areas and encourage travelers to visit specific destinations.
CVB CEO Leah Poole and program manager Amanda Scott took the familiarization tour groups to Seabrook Village, Fort Morris, Geechee Kunda and the Midway Museum. Each site has significant historical and cultural value in Liberty County and provided the visitor-information specialists with information regarding its operation, according to the tour guides.
“This tour provided our staff — which welcomes approximately 2,000 to 4,000 people to the state of Georgia daily — the ability to experience Liberty County,” said Savannah Visitor Information Center manager Kellie Lord-Zieba. “This firsthand experience will be brought back to the visitor centers and, in turn, be conveyed to our many visitors.  Thank you, Liberty County, for understanding the importance of your state visitor centers to your community.”
According to the Georgia Department of Economic Development, “Tourism is big business in Georgia — really big. The tourism industry in Georgia is the fifth- largest employer in the state with a total economic impact of $53.6 billion, supporting more than 411,000 jobs, or 10.2 percent of all payroll employment in Georgia. Taxes of $2.8 billion were directly and indirectly generated by tourism in 2013. Each household in Georgia would need to be taxed an additional $770 per year to replace the tourism taxes received by state and local governments.”
The CVB has information and links to each of the sites toured on its website. Go to www.libertycounty.org and click “See Liberty” or “Enjoy Liberty” for other attractions in the county. Visitors and residents also may call the CVB at 368-3580 for additional details.