IPW show a hit for Alabama

Alabama Folk Art wows New York critics

Tourist spending in Alabama hits all-time high; state records largest growth in visitors

Tourists spent $300M in Shoals in 2017

Heartbreak and heroes on the road to freedom: A trip to Alabama to learn how the struggle for civil rights changed America forever

Restaurants now able to sign up for Alabama Restaurant Week 2018

Alabama Governor’s Conference on Tourism

“Partner Pointer” for the tourism industry website

IPW show a hit for Alabama
Civil Rights Trail, Bollywood in Huntsville and Gulf Shores highlight

Highlights of the U.S. Travel Association’s IPW marketplace in Denver included Brand USA meetings on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail and the Bollywood movie being filmed in Huntsville as well as more than 100 appointments at Alabama’s booth.

IPW is the travel industry’s premier international marketplace and the largest generator of travel to the United States. The event was held in Denver last week. Alabama and other destinations attended at the marketplace to hold discussions with journalists and tour operators from around the world. The IPW event is also an opportunity for America’s nationwide destination marketing organization, Brand USA, to coordinate and promote tourism.

Among the Brand USA meetings was one centered on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. Alabama Tourism Department Deputy Director Grey Brennan attended that meeting, “It was a pleasure to meet with about a dozen of representatives from America’s national tourism organization on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. Brand USA expressed they were fully behind the trail which should elevate its promotion and lead to more tourism for Alabama,” said Brennan.

Alabama, Huntsville CVB and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center also held a top-level meeting with officials of the India office of Brand USA about tourism opportunities surrounding the filming of “Zero,” a Bollywood movie filming in Huntsville. Brand USA believes this could be a huge tourism opportunity for Alabama in this fast-growing tourism market, said Brennan. “Zero’ is the most expensive Bollywood movie ever and movie fans have been known to travel to see the actual locations where movies like this are filmed.”

For Beth Gendler of Gulf Shores/Orange Beach Tourism, it was the first time taking appointments on the marketplace floor.  She and the Alabama teams promoted the state’s beaches as a relaxing vacation connection, especially to those tour operators already looking at New Orleans for their clients. “Alabama’s premier travel routes for international travelers is Nashville to New Orleans through Alabama and a southern coastal route from New Orleans to Mobile and Gulf Shores,” said Graham Roderick, International Sales Manager.

Brian Jones, PR Manager for Alabama Tourism, held meetings on the media marketplace. One of the questions always asked by journalists is what’s new in Alabama. This year, Jones said, there was plenty to talk about. “The U.S. Civil Rights Trail, the lodge being built at Gulf State Park, and the Airbnb that has opened at the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum were all new attractions that journalists wanted to know more about,” said Jones. Other items of interest included Alabama’s Muscle Shoals music destinations, the Hank Williams Trail and Highlands Bar and Grill winning the James Beard Award as the most outstanding restaurant.

Alabama has several top attractions that were featured at the show. Those include the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center with Space Camp. Top events include Mobile’s Mardi Gras and live music venues such as Rattlesnake Saloon, the Hangout Festival and Gip’s Place.

The U.S. Civil Rights Trail includes sites in eight Alabama cities; Anniston, Birmingham, Monroeville, Montgomery, Scottsboro, Selma, Tuscaloosa and Tuskegee.

Attending the show was Graham Roderick, Grey Brennan and Brian Jones of the Alabama Tourism Department. Springna Zhoa, Alabama’s China coordinator was also at the booth along with in-market representatives, Janin Nachtweh of Germany and Andy Facer of the United Kingdom. Industry partners from Alabama attending were; Tom White of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Jennifer Moore of the Huntsville CVB, Tami Riest of the Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association, Keely Law of the Marriott Shoals Hotel & Spa, Sara Hamlin of the Greater Birmingham CVB and Beth Gendler of Gulf Shores/Orange Beach Tourism

Alabama Folk Art wows New York critics
From the article by Roberta Smith on NYTimes.com:

American art from the 20th and 21st centuries is broader, and better than previously acknowledged, especially by museums. As these institutions struggle to become more inclusive than before, and give new prominence to neglected works, they rarely act alone. Essential help has come from people like William Arnett and his exemplary Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Their focus is the important achievement of black self-taught artists of the American South, born of extreme deprivation and social cruelty, raw talent and fragments of lost African cultures.

The foundation is in the process of dispersing the entirety of its considerable holdings — some 1,200 works by more than 160 artists — to museums across the country. When it is finished, it may well have an impact not unlike that of the Kress Foundation, which from 1927 to 1961 gave more than 3,000 artworks to 90 museums and study collections.

The Met was the first of the foundation’s beneficiaries, receiving a gift of 57 artworks by 30 artists in 2014. Now, the museum celebrates its fortune with “History Refused to Die: Highlights From the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift.” A selection of 29 pieces, many of them rarely if ever shown, it is suffused by an electrifying sense of change.

The Met’s curators (and conservators) took nearly two years and several trips to Atlanta to finalize their selection, and they chose astutely. The show seems nearly perfect in art, installation and irrefutability of greatness. It has been organized by Randall R. Griffey and Amelia Peck, curators, respectively in the Met’s modern and contemporary department and its American Wing.

The effect is majestic. The show validates the art’s stature, but even more it transforms the Met’s encyclopedic footprint while also being of a piece of its longtime efforts to collect African art and American folk art.

Nine of Thornton Dial’s characteristically fierce, self-aware works are here, mostly his rangy relief paintings as well as three extraordinary drawings that in wildly different ways commemorate Sept. 11, Florence Griffith Joyner and Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. A dozen of the 18 geometric quilts in the gift are here. Both muted and boisterous, they challenge the conventional history of abstraction and reflect the talents of the Gee’s Bend collective, especially those of the Pettway family. There are also various assemblage reliefs and sculptures by Lonnie Holley and Ronald Lockett. And the most extensive conversation — in their endless intricacies and shared uses of fabrics, textures and the grid — is between the works of Dial, who died in 2016, and the quilters. The Dials start to seem like crazed, dimensionalized quilts, the quilts like flattened, more orderly Dials.

Nearly everything included is made from scavenged objects and materials, scraps redolent of the shameful history of black labor in the South — before 1865, of course, but also in the Jim Crow era — transformed by aesthetic intelligence and care into forms of eloquence and beauty. One of the most valuable lessons here is the works’ inherent formal and material sense of defiance, and of beauty itself as an act of resistance.

The show’s two hypnotic galleries have very different emotional and visual tones. After beckoning you from down the corridor with the bright colors and joyful asymmetry of Loretta Pettway’s “Medallion” quilt (circa 1960), the exhibition starts with an elegiac room of works nearly devoid of color.

Dial’s “Shadows of the Field” (2008) evokes haunted expanses of cotton plants with the help of strips of synthetic cotton batting. Along one wall, the “work-clothes” quilts of Lucy Mingo and four other Gee’s Benders reflect lives of hard labor and scrimping; their fabrics are almost exclusively blues and gray denim whose worn textures and faded colors are masterfully played off one another.

Emma Lee Pettway Campbell’s “Blocks and strips work-clothes quilt” from around 1950 may bring to mind Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed,” from 1955, which conspicuously incorporates an old quilt. Joe Minter’s 1995 symmetrical arrangement of rusted shovels, rakes, hoes and chains, seems to bless the whole room. Regal and severely gorgeous, it suggests both a group of figures and an altar. Its title pulls no punches: “Four Hundred Years of Free Labor.” Yet I also found myself thinking of the beguiling offering stand once called “Billy Goat and Tree,” from Sumer around 2600 B.C., one of the first full-page color reproductions in H.W. Janson’s “History of Art.”

The second gallery erupts in color, delivered foremost by seven Gee’s Bend quilts as brilliant in palette as in use of materials, especially Lucy T. Pettway’s woozy full-spectrum interplay of the traditional “housetop” and “bricklayer” patterns in a quilt from around 1955. Annie Mae Young’s 1976 work brings together the two quilt sensibilities here, surrounding a medallion of burning stripes of contrasting corduroy with a broad denim work-clothes border. It may evoke, rather fittingly, a small striped abstraction that Robert Motherwell made in 1941-44 and titled “Little Spanish Prison.”

Blessing the artworks here is a jaw-dropping Dial: a two-sided relief-painting-assemblage, and source of the exhibition’s title, “History Refused to Die.” One side shows a couple chained to, yet sheltered, by a white metal structure and surrounded by a turbulent expanse: pieces of fabric deftly knotted that seem to billow and blow like a stormy sea or clouds. The other side is a rough weaving of the straight stalks of the okra plant, which came to the United States from Africa during the slave trade. Its scattered colors are primarily the red, black, green and yellow of the 13-striped Afro-American flag and, at the upper right, the simple silhouette of a white dove of peace or freedom. At the top, a row of short steel angle beams, spray-painted with horizontal dashes of browns and black, flips in suggestion between good and bad, from a crown or headdress, to the top of a tall fence or chain-gang garb.

Several other works here are similarly simply masterpieces. In “Locked Up Their Minds,” Purvis Young offers his own version of James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889.” Young’s large painting on wood shows a group of black figures, some with halos, others holding up padlocks signifying their freed minds to flocks of angels, while two immense white possibly rampant horses add to the drama. The show’s coda is Dial’s ironically titled “Victory in Iraq,” a relief-painting from 2004. It hangs just outside the second gallery, its barbed wire and twisted mesh against a field of fabric and detritus defines and holds space as lightly and powerfully as Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm,” displayed nearby.

It is de rigueur when writing on exhibitions of this kind to review the shortcomings of the terms used to allude to the vast body of art, emerging in the 20th century, created by people limited by racial inequities, poor education, mental or physical challenges, or poverty. “Outsider” was superseded by “self-taught,” which didn’t work since many artists are not self-taught in some way. (Quilters, for example, learn their art from their female relatives.) The latest term is the more elastic “outlier” — put in play by an enormous survey seen recently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington that argued for the integration of such work with supposedly “insider” art while also undermining that position — since the outlier works often overwhelmed everything else.

At this point I think of the words of the little boy refusing to eat his vegetables in the famous New Yorker cartoon: “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” Let’s just call all of it art and proceed.

Let’s see the rest of the Met’s gift. Let’s see Mr. Arnett’s foundation, now headed by the experienced museum director, Maxwell Anderson, complete its task. So far it has dispersed around 20 percent of its holdings to seven museums, with the most recent gift — 34 works to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond — announced this week. By these numbers, another 40 or so museums should benefit. Every thinking American understands the suffering these artists and their ancestors have endured and should grasp the meaning of Dial’s poem of a title. History has indeed refused to die, and some of its greatest art is also very much alive.

For the complete article please see https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/arts/design/history-refused-to-die-review-outsider-art-met-museum.html

Tourist spending in Alabama hits all-time high; state records largest growth in visitors
From the article by Howard Koplowitz on AL.com:

Alabama tourism spending hit an all-time high of $14.3 billion in 2017 as a record 26 million travelers visited the Yellowhammer State last year, according to a report released Tuesday by the state Tourism Department and unveiled by Gov. Kay Ivey.

“Every part of the state saw dramatic growth, from the mountains of the Tennessee Valley to the beaches along the Gulf Coast,” the governor said in a statement before releasing the report at Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum in Birmingham. “Most communities generated more revenue and gained jobs through meetings, conventions, sporting events, visits to museums and other tourist attractions. The larger counties which have invested in sporting venues have seen an increase in the number of youth teams arriving from outside the immediate area for tournament.”

The state’s tourism industry grew by 7 percent, or $1 billion, in 2017, the report found. Jobs directly or indirectly created through tourism increased by nearly 7,400 jobs to 186,900 in 2017. Growth in the sector was the largest this year since the 2010 Gulf Coast oil spill, when $9 billion was spent by tourists statewide.

The state tourism job numbers are about double the U.S. Labor Department estimate of 89,640 travel-related jobs in Alabama as of 2016. The federal figure does not include jobs that were created indirectly by tourism.

Baldwin County led the state in tourist spending with $4.4 billion while Jefferson County’s tourism industry had the highest growth in Alabama at 9.8 percent, or an increase of 148,498 tourists. The state’s most populous county also recorded more than $2 billion in tourist spending for the first time.

Madison County had more than 85,000 more tourists visit from 2016 for 3.1 million guests. Those visitors spent $1.3 billion in the county – a 9.8 percent gain from 2016.

Mobile County’s tourism industry grew by 8 percent, the report found. About $1.6 billion was spent by the county’s 3.4 million tourists last year.

Montgomery County added 8,940 visitors from 2016 and recorded a 3.3 percent increase in tourist spending, the report found. The city of Mongomery had nearly 2 million visitors who spent $841 million, according to a study conducted by Montgomery economist Keivan Deravi.

Ivey said the growth in Alabama’s tourism industry saves state residents from having to pay an additional $467 in taxes a year.

“I am so proud to lead a state that has so much to offer to the people of the world, much less to our great state, and these numbers illustrate that people around the world want to come to Alabama to experience all the attractions that we have in our state,” she said at the museum.

Alabama Tourism Director Lee Sentel said the credit goes to the state’s tourism industry as a whole.
“This is not the Alabama Tourism Department. This is the 185,000 people…who are representing your cities and your attractions,” he said.

For the complete article please see https://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2018/05/tourist_spending_in_alabama_hi.html

Tourists spent $300M in Shoals in 2017
From the article by Russ Corey on TimesDaily.com:

Visitors to the Shoals spent nearly $300 million last year in Colbert and Lauderdale counties, according to figures released by the Alabama Tourism Department.

The department also said tourism was responsible for 3,658 jobs in the two counties.

Lauderdale County Tourism President and CEO Rob Carnegie said the $242 million spent in the county represented a 1.4 percent increase over 2016 when $238 million was spent.

The total represents money spent on lodging and meals and at attractions and festivals.

“It’s a great number,” Carnegie said. “it’s not a huge gain like we want to see, but anything that’s an increase, anything that’s showing a positive move forward, is good.”

Jobs were also up slightly, Carnegie said.

In neighboring Colbert County, visitors spent $54 million in 2017, according to Colbert County Tourism and Convention Bureau Executive Director Susann Hamlin.

“We had a tremendously good year last year,” Hamlin said.

While the county lost one hotel property, the Four-Way Inn, it’s benefitting from revenue being provided by the new Best Western Plus hotel near the Love’s Travel Stop on U.S. 72.

Hamlin said about 12 percent of the visitors to the county are international visitors.

Carnegie and Hamlin said it’s important to have a diverse mix of attractions and sporting events to attract tourists. Both counties can point to various cultural and music-related attractions. Both counties host athletic events from golf tournaments to fishing tournaments.

Hamlin said Ivy Green, the birthplace and childhood home of Helen Keller, has more visitors than any attraction in the area.

“Helen Keller is a big draw because of her travels around the world,” Hamlin said.

Music is another big draw, Hamlin said. The county is home to the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and FAME Recording Studios.

Lauderdale County is the birthplace of W.C. Handy, known as “The Father of the Blues,” and “The Father of Rock ‘N’ Roll,” Sam Phillips.

While Lauderdale County has fewer music-related attractions, it still benefits from music tourism.

“We have one of the greatest music brands in the world,” Carnegie said of the Shoals. “Our music history, our music legacy, the Muscle Shoals sound and this area are one of a kind.”

He said people also come to visits places like the Rosenbaum Home, the only house in the state designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. They also come to shop and dine out.

“The Shoals occupies a unique place in the mix of attractions Alabama has that bring in visitors from around the world,” State Tourism Director Lee Sentell said. “It is the only area in the state that is a destination that uses music as the focus to generate visitation.”

Sentell said ever since the “Muscle Shoals” documentary was released and distributed worldwide, foreign guests have arrived in growing numbers. International guests come to America and northwest Alabama for culture, primarily music and food. The Shoals has both in abundance, he said.

Sentell also pointed out what some already know about the Shoals.

“Tourists don’t care about state lines, city limits or county limits,” he said. “The Florence area is one tourist market composed of two counties. One happens to have more motel rooms than the other. That’s just how economic statistics get compiled. The more that the two counties’ marketing operations work together and share projects, the more tourists will visit the region. It is inefficient for both counties to print almost identical publications and websites. It confuses the potential guests.”

He praised the work of Judy Hood and Debbie Wilson at the revitalized Muscle Shoals Sound Studio at 3614 Jackson Highway, and Dixie Griffin, manager of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame for increasing the number of visitors at those attractions.

“Tourism continues to be an economic driver, and music has moved to the forefront of our asset mix in the Shoals,” Wilson said. “The generation of increased visitation by the studios continues to have a significant impact on the bottom line for the local hospitality industry.”

She said international travelers spend more, stay longer, and share their experiences on social media more often and to a wider audience than domestic travelers.

Hood said more than 30,000 visitors from 40 different countries and every state in the union have toured Muscle Shoals Sound since it opened. She said 40 percent of the studio’s visitors are from another country.

“The music recorded in Muscle Shoals does not belong to us,” she said. “It belongs to the world.”

For the complete article please see http://www.timesdaily.com/news/tourists-spent-m-in-shoals-in/article_79e3f543-e64e-55a9-ae8a-690172bdf3cf.html

Heartbreak and heroes on the road to freedom: A trip to Alabama to learn how the struggle for civil rights changed America forever
From the article by Graham Boynton on DailyMail.co.uk:

Editor’s note: U.K. writer Graham Boynton visited Alabama in January. He was assisted in his travels by Graham Roderick, Surinder Manku and Brian Jones with the Alabama Tourism Department, Meg Lewis with the Montgomery CVB, Sheryl Smedley with the Selma Chamber and Vickie Ashford with the Birmingham CVB.  The Daily Mail has an average daily circulation of 1.4 million.

Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama, is one of the most important single strips of urban asphalt in American political history.

It was from here that the telegram that started the Civil War was sent on April 11, 1861, the war that led to the ending of slavery.

It was here that almost a century later Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white bus passenger in an act that galvanised the civil rights Movement.

And it was here in 1954 that Martin Luther King accepted his call to the ministry and started preaching at what is now the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. As Lee Sentell, the director of the Alabama Tourism Department, tells me “the Civil War and civil rights are bookends of the same story.”

Dexter Avenue and the Civil Rights Movement may not have figured in many British visitors’ itineraries, but they are in the spotlight now as this is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. You can take a road trip from Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham in Alabama through to Jackson, once the dark heart of Mississippi segregation, and on to Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr King was shot in April 1968.

Along the way are Freedom Trail historic markers of significant locations, museums that tell the story so graphically that one leaves drained, Baptist churches that host glorious gospel choirs and stirring preachers as they did at the height of the civil rights movement, and witnesses of the struggle who Lee describes as “the last of the pioneers, our wonderful non-renewable resources.”

The driving is easy because US highways are generally state-of-the-art, and along the way the Southern food is excellent, the hospitality is warm and the entertainment outside of the civil rights sites is terrific. There’s good Southern music in every club, bar and Baptist church you care to visit.

Montgomery, the state capital, has also entered my top five favourite cities in the world. It has a population of 200,000, is easy to get around, has modern restaurants (try Central and Vintage Year) and bars (Aviator and Kru) and Hank Williams lived here, wrote some of his songs while eating at Chris’ Hotdogs, and was buried here.

Plus the fact that Chris’s serves the best hot dogs I’ve ever had, something that over the years has been confirmed by a list of devotees that includes Elvis Presley, Clark Gable and Martin Luther King.

However, for me the highlight of this trip is talking to some of the “non-renewable resources.” They are not the famous names associated with the struggle – but the “foot soldiers of civil rights,” and what they share is the quiet dignity and bravery that characterised this movement.

I grew up in apartheid South Africa and although it is facile to compare examples of institutional racism, there was a bare-faced cruelty about Deep South racists, particularly those with affiliations to the Ku Klux Klan, that made the apartheidists seem somewhat benign by comparison.

Dianne Harris is a retired schoolteacher in her late 60s who now guides groups of tourists through the somewhat shabby hamlet of Selma (half an hour’s drive from Montgomery), one of Alabama’s civil rights centres. It’s most famous structure is the Edmund Pettus Bridge where on Bloody Sunday in 1965 state troopers attacked a procession of marchers, injuring dozens. Dianne, who was jailed twice for taking part in marches, remembers “there was so much tear gas… so much blood running down people’s faces.”

Selma’s black citizens had to step off the sidewalk if they met a white woman coming in the opposite direction, and they were warned by their parents not to touch anything in the town’s stores lest they be falsely accused of stealing. As we stop at an historic marker outside Selma’s First Baptist Church, Dianne points to a black and white photograph of her 15-year-old self marching through these streets in 1964.

A few days later, over lunch at Birmingham’s Rib It Up, Emma Bonner, now 72, remembers how terrified she was as a protesting schoolgirl when the city fire department’s hoses were turned on them at a pressure that could “rip the bark off trees.” Like Dianne Harris, she marched “on behalf of our parents.”

Nobody could fire us “cos we had no jobs.” She was arrested and held for two days, but her most vivid memory is of Sept. 15, 1964, the day that four young girls attending Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church were killed by a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan. “I remember thinking how inhuman can you be? The only people in Sunday school were children,” She says. “They must have known that. How could they have done that?”

Emma’s nephew Barry takes me to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute which provides more harsh testimony of Alabama’s racist past. Here Martin Luther King delivered one of his most passionate speeches, in the wake of the church bombing across the street.

“I like to believe,” he said, “that the negative extremes of Birmingham’s past will resolve into the positive and utopian extreme of her future, that the sins of a dark yesterday will be redeemed in the achievements of a bright tomorrow.” It is still a work in progress.

A three-hour drive to Jackson, Mississippi lands me in the newest civil rights museum, opened last November by Myrlie Evers, the widow of Medgar Evers, another black leader gunned down by a white supremacist. Here I meet Fred Clark, a Freedom Rider in 1961 who is now one of the museum’s ambassadors.

Having spent time in jail for protesting, Fred says he was blackballed in Birmingham and couldn’t get a decent job for years, scratching out a living as a caddie at the local whites-only golf course.

I ask him how he and his fellow protesters retained the non-violent discipline demanded by Dr King in the face of such provocation. He responds emphatically. “It all came out of the church,” he says. “My people demanded I go to church and out of that came our collective pacifism.”

It is at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute that I am stopped in my tracks by one story told in harsh detail through still photography and newsreel footage – that of three idealistic young community volunteers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were ambushed by local Ku Klux Klan members after being released from jail on a phoney speeding charge during the 1964 “Summer of Freedom.” The government poured troops and FBI officers into the rogue state in search of the missing men and a month later, their bodies were unearthed. They had been shot to death.

Much of the drive for civil rights came from the traditions and culture instilled in people by the Southern Baptist churches, and one of the most uplifting experiences of this tour is to attend a live Baptist service.

On my last Sunday I spend the morning at the Cade Chapel Missionary Baptist Church where I am greeted like an old friend by preachers and parishioners alike and treated to two hours of thrilling gospel music and impassioned sermons about peace, love and neighbourliness. Suddenly I get it. It is a suitable ending to a very moving road trip.

For the complete article please see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-5709431/A-trip-Alabama-learn-struggle-civil-rights-changed-America-ever.html

Restaurants now able to sign up for Alabama Restaurant Week 2018
Restaurants, sign up and be a part of the locally owned and operated restaurants who participate in Alabama Restaurant Week 2018. This year the more-than-week-long event is Aug. 10-19. Last year almost 100 restaurants were a part of the event showcasing local food, fun and flavor.

This year, participating restaurants will receive in-store promotional items and be listed on the website along with their meal offerings. Participating restaurants set meal prices at $10, $20, $30 and $40 for dinner and $10 and $15 for lunch. In all cases, the price is per person and does not include tax, tip and drink. Restaurants have the choice of offering one or more meals at the preset price.

There is no cost for restaurants to participate in this statewide promotion. For more details and sign-up information, please seewww.alabamarestaurantweek.com or contact Courtney Austin at 334-242-4674 or Grey Brennan at 334-242-4545.

Alabama Governor’s Conference on Tourism
The Alabama Governor’s Conference on Tourism is Aug. 4-7 at the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel and Spa.

The conference provides tourism professionals a chance to gather and learn about the economic impact of the industry on the Alabama economy, learn new strategies for marketing local Alabama attractions and amenities to visitors, raise money for scholarships through silent auctions and celebrate achievements.

For an agenda, list of speakers and registration information please see http://www.alabamagovernorsconference.com/

“Partner Pointer” for the tourism industry website
Would you like to be featured in the 2019 Alabama Vacation Guide? Login to your Partner account and submit your event. Deadline: June 30. http://partners.alabama.travel/users/signin

Tourism Tuesdays is a free electronic newsletter produced by the Alabama Tourism Department. It contains news about the state tourism department and the Alabama tourism industry.

The newsletter can also be accessed online by going to: www.tourism.alabama.gov

To subscribe to the newsletter please contact Dwayne O’Riley at: dwayne.oriley@tourism.alabama.gov