Downtown Walking Tours are ending

[Bill Hoff]

The qoutes are pretty darn disappointing.

The tours have run in downtown for 7 years and has been rated on Trip Advisor with 92 percent "excellent" reviews.

"We are the best example that Jacksonville is both walkable and safe," wrote company president Gary Sass. "Many of our 3,000 guests each year stayed for lunch after the tour which was a plus for downtown."

The company also provided free tours to partners, meeting planners, police, travel writers and more. Sass said that it was hard to pinpoint the exact reason for the decrease in attendance, but a major contributing factor was that "many local businesses viewed the walking tours as a distraction in their building versus an asset to downtown." This resulted in constantly changing routes which affected marketing.

And marketing downtown when downtown is frequently portrayed as "unsafe in news media" is difficult, Sass added.

Sass said he did email key city officials asking for assistance to save the program a few weeks ago. He received no responses.

"I guess the business community just decided, nope, we don't need it," he said.


Full story:
https://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2018/12/26/jacksonville-walking-tours-to-end-downtown-tour.html

[Jagsdrew]

This bums me out. It is a great tour if you haven't done it before. We tell our friends about it all the time.

[thelakelander]

It is unfortunate. Gary does a great tour. I wonder if it's possible to do a tour that doesn't require going in properties that don't want you there? The free walking tour model in other cities appears to be pretty interesting.

[remc86007]

"Sass said he did email key city officials asking for assistance to save the program a few weeks ago. He received no responses."

What?

How much money could this possibly take to subsidize? If we are only talking a couple thousand a year, isn't this a good use of the bed-tax since it is quite literally generating bed-tax revenue?

[thelakelander]

^To be honest, I wouldn't expect to hear much from key city officials. I would also believe that tours can be done without subsidization. This one lasted seven years without public assistance. The article leaves a lot of questions. This particular tour is a "top" to "bottom", so it directly involves entering private properties. If those property owners don't see the benefit or don't want to be bothered, there's little someone can do.

However, our history is significant and interesting enough that I wonder if different types of walking tours could work? Over the last two or three years, I've been doing the free walking tours in various places I've traveled. I wonder if this model would work locally.

https://www.freetourspittsburgh.com/

https://freetoursbyfoot.com/chicago-tours/