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Shenandoah unveils tourism website with virtual tours and booking links
Summary
City staff showcased a new tourism-focused website that integrates video, virtual aerial and indoor tours, hotel and restaurant listings, and search enhancements intended to boost visitor planning and bookings.
Mr. Maynard, a city staff presenter, demonstrated Shenandoah's newly launched tourism website, which the city soft-launched the week before Thanksgiving after a 13-month development process. The site features integrated video, templated pages for hotels and restaurants, Threshold 360 and SkyNav virtual tours, capacity charts for meeting planners, and links to partner booking pages.
The presentation emphasized features intended to help meeting planners and visitors compare amenities and plan itineraries. "It's been a bit of a journey. It's taken us 13 months to get here," Mr. Maynard said, summarizing the work that went into the site and noting that most photography came from local partners. He added that pages include schema markup and meta tags to help search engines and AI-driven discovery.
During Q&A, resident John Samuelson praised the site's design but warned that casual users might not find it without stronger search visibility. City staff acknowledged that search engine optimization (SEO) work and partner proofing remain ongoing, and said the site's structured data should improve discoverability over time.
The site includes listings organized by hotels, dining and attractions, sortable amenities, integrated Google Maps directions and virtual tours intended to aid sports teams and meeting planners evaluating meeting spaces and lodging. City staff said partners are reviewing pages to ensure accuracy and noted plans to continue SEO and data validation efforts before broader promotional pushes.
The administration asked council to note the demonstration; there was no formal vote tied to the presentation. The site will be publicly available while staff continues backend enhancements and partner verifications.
