Welcome to the inaugural issue of Michigan Tourism Business (MTB)! In our time of rapid change, keeping abreast of events and trends impacting Michigan's tourism industry has never been more important or problematic. It seems that demands on us grow daily, leaving less and less time to seek out and absorb evermore information of critical importance to tourism professionals. 

Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone would systematically monitor the mushrooming flow of information that surrounds us in the media, on the internet, and varied other sources, prepare readable abstracts of what is most important, and make it available on demand? Wouldn't it be even better if this service was available to you free of charge?

This is our vision for Michigan Tourism Business.  Our goal is to provide a very broad overview of news that is of interest to you, but the coverage of most subjects will not be in-depth.  However, where you can go for more information will be provided to allow you to learn more about subjects of particular interest to you.

We are producing this newsletter for a couple of primary reasons.  First, our major funding partner, the Michigan Virtual University, has licensed an extensive collection of online training materials which are available free to employees of small Michigan businesses.  This virtual library's value is realized only when the training modules are used.  We will be customizing some of these modules to enhance their relevance to employees of the tourism industry.  As these customized training materials (i.e., courses) become available, they will be featured in this newsletter along with selected modules we deem of particular relevance to you and your employees.  Thus, one goal of the newsletter is to stimulate use of MVU's virtual training materials and thereby contribute to its Michigan employee work force development mission.

Our second goal is simply to provide tourism business owners and managers with a one-stop source of relevant news.  We will feature policy developments in Lansing and Washington, new research results from MSU and other sources, trends that may impact Michigan tourism and other news items useful to tourism professionals.

We plan to initially publish MTB monthly and to complete about one new customized virtual tourism training course every three months.  The topic of the first course, in the planned series of five courses, will be customer relations training for front-line employees.  Topics for other courses in the series will be based upon inputs received from our board of advisors and feedback from MTB readers. We welcome your suggestions.  We are also exploring how to acknowledge those who complete individual courses and specified sets of courses to include issuing "certificates of completion" and continuing education credits.

There are a number of ways that you can help us to build this newsletter value:

• pass it on to others you know who should be included as MTB readers
• send us news that you think should be included in future issues
• email us your suggestions, comments, likes, dislikes, etc.
• encourage your employees to take advantage of the training opportunities highlighted in each issue.  

While we believe that most of you will want to continue receiving MTB and no action is necessary to remain on our mailing list, please take the opportunity to delete yourself from our readership by following the instructions in the Subscription box in the right column of this newsletter if you are not interested in receiving monthly issues of MTB.

Thanks for your attention and we are looking forward to your feedback.

Don Holecek, co-editor (dholecek@msu.edu)
Joe Fridgen, co-editor (jfridgen@msu.edu)