Last week at the Georgia Governor’s Tourism Conference on Jekyll Island, Visit Savannah and Visit Tybee were honored along with the Golden Isles CVB with the Bill Hardman, Sr. Tourism Partnership Champion Award. Visit Savannah President Joseph Marinelli and Visit Tybee Director Sara Lane are pictured below with the awards.
 
The Partnership Champion Award is given to an alliance that collaborates to increase visitation and tourism expenditures in image003.jpgGeorgia. The three destination marketing organizations were honored for their work on the new I-95 Welcome Center at Port Wentworth, which has set the standard for how the state’s welcome centers will be reimagined in the future.

“The collaboration between Visit Savannah, Visit Tybee and the Golden Isles CVB for our work on the new Welcome Center by Governor Deal is a terrific honor,” says Marinelli. “We recognized that southbound travelers on I-95 are only in Georgia for about 116 miles and we wanted to create an experience that will encourage people to visit Savannah, Tybee Island and the rest of the Georgia Coast.”
 
The facility at mile marker 111 replaced the old building constructed around 40 years ago. It welcomes over two million visitors per year.
 
This is the second time that Visit Savannah has been honored with the Tourism Partnership Champion Award. The organization was presented with the award in 2014 in partnership with the Tourism Leadership Council for the collaboration that both organizations provide in leading Savannah’s leadership efforts.