VisitGlenwood.com is the official travel website representing the community of Glenwood Springs. This website functions as both a promotional tool and as a source for visitor information about attractions, lodging, the history of our town, news and more. While this website is geared toward helping visitors plan their vacations and promote our local tourism businesses, we find that locals also enjoy and frequently use visitglenwood.com.

DINING FACET SEARCH TO REPRESENT GLENWOOD SPRINGS’ OUTSTANDING DINING SCENE

Glenwood Springs offers an outstanding and diverse dining scene. We decided that highlighting each restaurant with their own landing page on visitglenwood.com is a great way to support our restaurants. This was a labor-intensive but crucial step to elevate the search rankings for Glenwood Springs’ restaurants and to enhance the visitor experience.

The local, official Google Partner and WordPress web design company BlizzardPress worked with us on the implementation of a nifty facet search to enhance the website experience. Visitors can now search by criteria such as time of day, type of food, and amenities like outside seating, vegetarian-friendly, serves alcohol, etc.

The dining search uses Google Maps APIs, so filtered restaurant results can be displayed on a map. As visitglenwood.com is mobile-friendly, you can now stand anywhere in Glenwood Springs and find the closest option of whatever restaurant satisfies your hunger. We will go ahead and claim that this local tool can do more for you than Yelp, as we do our best to include every dining option without offering sponsored listings to give a fairer representation of our communities’ food options.

In addition, we create blog posts, with help from our local contractor Resort Trends. These blogs offer dining recommendations based on specific needs that help us highlight our dining options on social media and other outlets.

FOODIE TRAVEL TRENDS

Over the past few years, food tourism has been a buzzy trend in the travel industry. Not only is it appealing to a large population of travelers, but it also has the potential to boost in-destination spending and therefore positively benefit local economies and small businesses.

Many of our restaurants have been featured in national and international publications. Slope & Hatch, The Pullman, Glenwood Canyon Brew Pub, Co. Ranch House, Casey Brewing and Sweet Coloradough are some of the frequently featured restaurants. We find that foodie travel offers great potential beyond increased spending of tourists that are already visiting. Specific restaurants that have been featured in the media and on blogs, as well as towns that have a general great foodie reputation can be the entire reason for a vacation to a destination. A foodie traveler may not have come to Glenwood Springs for the hot springs, rafting, hiking, skiing, Doc Holliday, etc., but primarily to explore our local dining scene. While these travelers will certainly appreciate our other amenities, foodies can help us fill shoulder seasons and support local businesses during the winter months.

Therefore, we will continue to do our best to highlight our outstanding dining scene.

CALL TO ACTION FOR RESTAURANT OWNERS

If you are a restaurant owner, please go to visitglenwood.com and review your listing. Feel free to email marlene@visitglenwood.com if you would like to update your photos or change any information.

CALL TO ACTION FOR LOCAL FOODIES #DINEGLENWOOD

Share your local dining experience and support your favorite restaurants with #DineGlenwood. We feature user-generated content on our website and frequently share it to social media.

Marlene Neidert is tourism promotion project manager for Visit Glenwood Springs, a department of the Glenwood Springs Chamber Resort Association.