Travel Manitoba Canada and McKim Communications met today with various Portage la Prairie groups combining efforts to promote tourism in both the City and RM in order to discuss making the area a tourism highlight.

Colin Ferguson"We created a program at Travel Manitoba that we refer to as Place Branding," says Colin Ferguson, Travel Manitoba president, and CEO. "We're not coming in to try to develop products. We're trying to find ways to brand communities and couple all the product that currently exists from a tourism perspective."

Southport Aerospace CEO Peggy May was integral in getting the meeting organized, and says she's been on the Travel Manitoba board for three years and recalls Ferguson's reports of great success in promoting Clear Lake, noting she saw it firsthand. That led to bringing key people to Portage yesterday.

Vern MayPortage Regional Economic Development executive director Vern May also played a large factor in the meeting and adds information obtained yesterday will be reviewed to determine Portage's brand. They will return about the end of August and talk about those ideas. This will put them in a position to enter the 2018 budget year to aggressively market tourism in our city as well as the RM of Portage. May says he was encouraged by a number of organizations already accomplishing doing great work that can work together to accomplish this feat.

He notes there has to be a central collection point for information. May offers a case-in-point and recounts how he consulted six different references to find a list of events to calendar them all in a Winnipeg Town and Country paper, and yet he still missed some. He notes he looked everywhere he could think of, but being so new to the city he was limited. He notes weaknesses like this are commonly noted across the board and it's encouraging to see where they can go with that in the future.

Local groups gather at Glesby Centre in joint effort to work toward tourism in City and RM of Portage