Meet Egret

Egret Communications has a long history of helping destinations work through the issues of planning destination development and marketing.  The company has tackled diverse destination challenges, always working to achieve tourism success in a way that builds a partnership in the tourism community and between tourism and the local community.  We have worked hard to guide communities through sometimes troubling conversations so they can make decisions that are good for the health of the community as well as the health of the tourism industry.

We have helped communities shape, develop, and market new tourism economies to replace devastating economic losses.  We have helped plan and guide the recovery of tourism economies shattered by tragic natural disaster.  We have helped communities and tourism pick up the pieces and plan for recovery after tourism has run amok over the quality of life.  We have helped unorganized tourism regions organize and begin to function as a destination.  We have helped destinations refocus on new patrons and new products and activities to increase profits, decrease social impacts, avoid hitting limits, and revalue the destination.

We are very good at listening, and at helping various sides of the discussion see the others’ points of view.  We’re skilled at looking at a destination, its products and experiences, through the eyes of the visitor, and helping that destination find ways to better attract and better serve those visitors.

We originated a process called “tourism engineering” in which tourism is required to be more than just business success; rather it is designed

1. to achieve specific goals that are important to the host community,
2. to minimize impacts to key community and tourism resources (natural, heritage, and cultural),
3. to sustain itself over time economically, socially, and environmentally.

When we speak of tourism engineering, we speak of sorting through the many possible outputs and prioritizing those outputs based on the desires and needs of the clients.  Oftentimes, the resulting model for development, promotion, or operation of a regional tourism economy is quite different than if we had simply sought to create the most profits in the shortest time.  Egret specializes in balancing economic success of tourism enterprises (and economies) with the management of impacts and the generation of benefits that don’t show up on the bottom line.  In a well-engineered tourism economy the host community and resource managers are full partners with the tourism industry – the relationship is symbiotic.

We’re known as a company that will tell it like it is rather than glossing over an issue by telling a client what it wants to hear.  But we do that in a way that creates opportunities for sides to come together in partnership and deal directly with difficult issues.

Our tourism experience is not all about planning.  We’ve done the hard work to build new products and launch them in the tourism market.  We’ve successfully marketed individual businesses and large destinations out of troubled situations.  We’ve designed products, seen them to completion, and have guided the first wave of visitors through the product.  One of our greatest compliments came from a rural tourism entrepreneur in Costa Rica who said of us “they walk with the snakes” which meant that we had done the hard things and knew first hand what we were talking about.  So, when we sit down with the industry and talk tourism, it isn’t an academic exercise for us.  We’re talking about a subject we know and love.

Egret has a deep knowledge of how tourism functions and with our client base that extends from South America to the United States to China we keep ourselves abreast of tourism trends and issues, so we can apply that knowledge to any project.  At the same time, Egret recognizes that a tourism plan must be read, understood, and acted upon by people with a wide variety of backgrounds (including government officials, resource managers, citizens, and entrepreneurs with no formal tourism training). It is our policy to conduct discussions and write documents without heavy use of tourism jargon, so that everyone who participates in the process or uses the resulting documents can fully understand the discussion or plan.

Egret is ready to rise to the challenge of guiding the discussion in Essex County to both strengthen the partnership among those involved with and having interests in tourism, and to vision a tourism future that is economically successful, supportive of the local community, and managed in a cohesive manner.

Read Albuquerque's Destination Master Plan