Despite a rainy afternoon and evening on Canada Day, Lacombe Regional Tourism was able to put on their fireworks show and special events at an indoor location at the Gary Moe Auto group Sportsplex on July 1st. The celebration was the first full-scale Canada Day for the last two years.  

Since the pandemic, Lacombe Regional Tourism has been taking advantage of their new mobile office known as the Mobile Visitor Centre.  

“We are actually down at the gasoline or the Red Deer Gasoline Alley Farmers Market every Saturday promoting the region. We're even looking to go further than that. It's been really well received all around. It's spectacular,” said Executive Director of Lacombe Regional Tourism, Austin Weaver.  

He says there are plenty of opportunities for the organization with a mobile office.  

“The advantages of being mobile are we can go where the visitors are, we can go to the groups of visitors that are at campgrounds or at local events or even further than that. We're in that active attraction role, now where we can go to Red Deer, Calgary, Airdrie, Edmonton and actively promote the community and county at large,” said Weaver.  

Previously, Lacombe Regional Tourism had an office space in Lacombe’s Flat Iron Building which has since been taken over by the Lacombe and District Historical Society.  

Austin Weaver took over the role of Executive Director in midst of the pandemic, during that time the organization revamped some of their operations. However, now that restrictions have lifted and Lacombe Regional Tourism is able to more effectively get out into the community Weaver says there is lots of exciting things to look forward to in the future.  

“We have a new three-year strategic plan that we put in place that allowed us to follow through with our Mobile Visitor Center. It's allowed us to rebrand our website and we've got a lot more exciting things coming down the pipes as far as a destination marketing organization goes,” said Weaver.  

You can check out Lacombe Regional Tourism’s new website here.