Our View: Kudos to those who help and serve our tourists

May 7-13 is National Travel and Tourism Week, and the Havre Daily News wants to thank the people who make tourists feel welcome in our area.

And it fills a major need. Not only does it continue the reputation of the Golden Triangle as a laid-back, friendly, welcoming area — a nice reputation to have — it brings major cash to everyone.

The University of Montana’s Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research found that in 2015, nonresidents spent more than $37 million in Hill County while visiting here.

Using an oft-cited rule that every dollar spent in a community recirculates seven times — the grocery store worker buys something at the hardware store, the hardware store employee buys a meal at a restaurant, the restaurant worker buys a pair of shoes, the shoe store worker buys gas for a vehicle and so on — tourism, in the end, brought more than $200 million to Hill County that year.

This region of Montana has some stellar attractions, for recreation, for history, for ecology, just for natural beauty. The attractions will bring people here — even if not as a destination, people en route to Glacier National Park or elsewhere in the state and in the country stop and visit attractions — but it is the people who make them welcome, make them want to stay and make them want to come back.

The theme for this year’s National Tourism Week is “The Faces of Tourism.” One side of that is who are the people who travel, who visit local sites and what do they do for the area.

But who have the faces they see in the local communities? Who are the people they talk to, buy things from, ask questions to? Those are the people on the other side of the coin, and they are the people who bring that $37 million into the county.

The Havre Daily News thanks and congratulates the people in our area who make our visitors feel welcome. They go out of their way to be friendly, helpful and even fun,

And kudos to the people working to revitalize downtown Havre. One of the first steps, putting colored covers on traffic boxes at the stoplights in town and more are in the works. That not only makes downtown a more pleasant place for local residents, it makes it more inviting for people passing through.

And everyone can pitch in, from helping during Havre Pride to clean up the community or picking up trash when it is seen at any point to just saying, “Hi” to people and being our general friendly, laid-back north-central Montana selves.

This part of the country already is a major player in tourism, as the numbers from the institute for Tourism and Recreation show, and we can all play a part in making it even bigger.

Watch for a Hi-Line Living this week talking about — and showing — some local faces of tourism.