Author Archives: Finger Lakes Community College

Let’s call them visitors – not tourists

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Jeanne Fagan

The writer is Jeanne Fagan, Professor of Business Administration at Finger Lakes Community College.

Fanny packs. Loud clothes. Goofy behavior. Somehow our notion of a tourist went sour.

Blame it on Chevy Chase? It hardly matters. I say we junk the term and use only the word “visitor.”

Think about it. When you have a visitor, you clean the house, you buy flowers, you buy the gourmet coffee.

The image of the tacky tourist has unfortunately tainted tourism in general. As coordinator of two community college tourism degree programs, I get a little miffed by the misunderstanding or lack of respect for the industry.

Here is a sector of the economy that generated $1.8 trillion in 2010 and supported 14 million jobs, 7.4 million directly in the travel industry and 6.7 million in other industries.  And you can’t outsource tourism. The Grand Canyon isn’t going anywhere.

People and high places are starting to “get” tourism’s potential for job creation. In January, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to address the issue of easing visa requirements to make it easier for international visitors to access the United States as a destination.

Read more about it here.

It’s about time. We’ve been losing ground in the international tourism market for years. In 2000, the U.S. enjoyed 17 percent of the global long-haul travel market. By 2010, that number had dropped to 12.4 percent.

To truly take advantage of the opportunities this executive order brings, we need an educated workforce, and we need to broaden our idea of what a tourism job is. Sure there are seasonal ticket booth workers, waitresses and parking attendants. But every attraction – from a winery to a ski resort – has a core of full-time year-round workers. Hotels, chambers of commerce and marketing agencies are well-served by employees with a tourism background. We need museum directors, event coordinators, concierges and others who understand the need to welcome foreign visitors and help them interpret American culture – in other words, treat them like the much-anticipated visitors that they are.

Finger Lakes Community College’s tourism programs are perfectly positioned to take advantage of this new focus and developing respect for the tourism industry. FLCC is also one a few destination-based tourism programs, which means we focus on how teaching students how to develop and market a destination. For many our students, that destination is the Finger Lakes region itself, which is increasingly a favored by international tourists.

Tourism doesn’t just benefit those employed in the industry. Very often, a nice place to visit is a nice place to live. A community that values tourism will value itself, paying attention to its environment and quality of life. Just one more reason to welcome those visitors.

All she could think of in class was — chocolate

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Jasmine Mead

Chocolate. Jasmine Mead thought about chocolate in her Marketing class. She thought about it some more in her Retail Business Management class. And again in Small Business Management.

She didn’t so much want to eat it as make it – and make it in a way no one else has.

Homeschooled and exceptionally driven, Jasmine entered Finger Lakes Community College at age 16 with a plan to use every class in her marketing major to turn her concept for a niche chocolatier into a business plan. College, for Jasmine, was not a stepping stone to something else. She wanted it to be the direct path to her own storefront.

“From the very start of my time at FLCC, I decided that I would make the conscious decision to apply everything I learned to my business,” said Jasmine, now 19. Continue reading →

Cattails, construction, creativity

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The weir holding back stormwater in the FLCC cattail marsh.

If you’re lucky, you’ll catch sight of a great blue heron from the small wooden deck at the edge of the cattail marsh at Finger Lakes Community College in upstate New York. More likely you’ll frighten a few northern leopard frogs.

It’s a quiet spot on FLCC’s 250-acre campus, but it’s not just another pretty place.

This marsh and two neighboring wetlands play a key role in the ongoing construction to accommodate the College’s enrollment – which like that of other community colleges – has grown rapidly in recent years. Continue reading →

Black Bears: The John Waynes of the Woods

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FLCC research cameras caught this black bear in the middle of a "cowboy walk."

As a camp counselor in the Adirondacks, Alyssa Johnson sees black bears as vagrants, nosing into trash bins for something a picky camper left behind.

But at Finger Lakes Community College, Alyssa has seen another side of the forest-dwelling Ursus americanus: the cowboy side.

It seems that every so often black bears will purposely mosey through the woods with a bit of a swagger, kicking their legs out to make their trail wider. Then they purposefully retread these footprints, leaving depressions that can be the size of dinner plates.

It’s an odd behavior, and it turns out, no one has gathered much data on it — until last fall when Alyssa enrolled in professor John Van Niel’s bear management class. Continue reading →