Eugene native Samara Phelps takes helm at Travel Lane County aiming to boost local tourism

If home is where the heart is, then Samara Phelps’ home has always been in Lane County.

Travel Lane County’s new president and CEO, Phelps is taking over the organization where she got her start in the tourism industry over 17 years ago.

Phelps is a Eugenean, a University of Oregon alum and a graduate of both the Chinook Institute for Civic Leadership and the Oregon Tourism Leadership Academy. In 2007, she joined the Travel Lane County team as a visitor services coordinator. She transitioned roles, becoming the director of visitor services and then the director of stakeholder relations. By 2015, her career took her to Clackamas County Tourism, where she became the agency’s executive director in 2019.

The call of service to Lane County brought her back to where she grew up. Now, about a month into her new role, Phelps is setting out to make Eugene, Cascades and Coast the premier destination for travelers seeking leisure, sporting events and access to the vast assets across Lane County.

Phelps said it has been an honor to share her treasured life experiences, such as hikes at Mt. Pisgah and surfing sand dunes in Florence, with visitors. She said she hadn’t realized how special her regular trips to the Oregon Coast had been until she encountered travelers who saved up funds, made the trip and loved the new experience.

“Being from Eugene, that was honestly one of the greatest gifts that I was ever given because there are reasons that you’re from someplace. It’s the water you swim in,” Phelps said. “As a traveler at heart and somebody who believes in place, that’s what I really built my personal mission around: the power of place.”

She said sharing that “power of place” with visitors requires dedicated, deliberate and intentional partnerships with communities countywide. Phelps said Travel Lane County staff are “great storytellers,” considering storytelling a “superpower” of the organization. For her, partnering with communities to share their stories sits at the heart of the work Travel Lane County does in the region.

“In a lot of ways, travel, tourism and our destination work is part of economic development. A lot of times when we talk about where we fit in, that is the welcome mat, that it’s somebody’s introduction to the community and the experiences,” Phelps said. “Every one of those visits is also a contribution through the dollars to the community, but it’s also a contribution to the brand and a contribution to the community’s identities.”

In the nine years Phelps was with Clackamas County Tourism, she focused on destination development, where locations undergo strategic planning to help attract tourism to that specific area.

Andy Vobora, vice president of stakeholder relations for Travel Lane County, said the industry has seen change since Phelps was last working in Lane County. Last year, the organization’s board voted to change the membership structure from a paid-only model to one that offers free, base-level membership opportunities to business owners who may struggle to pay dues on top of their other financial obligations. In terms of destination development, he said the agency is excited to learn from Phelps’s experience and expertise.

“Destination development, it’s just been something that we’ve never had here,” Vobora said. “The other one is really around being more sophisticated. We use a lot more data to determine how we spend our marketing dollars and how we work for different audiences and it’s super powerful.”

What Phelps said has remained the same while she’s been away is Travel Lane County’s core values in how the organization serves the community.

“The pillars for us as an organization are around accessibility, sustainability and inclusivity. It’s interesting to hear that because those things sound very on-trend right now,” Phelps said. “It is on-trend right now, but there is no way we would exist as an organization in this community if those things had not always been driving and filtering the work that we are doing.”

As Travel Lane County seeks ways to support winter tourism, contribute to a strong local economy and serve the community it exists within, Phelps said the work it does is centered on public service.

“For me personally, it comes from a passion for place and the care, stewardship and sharing of a place,” she said. “It is such a beautiful intersection of being able to live in a place, give to a place and share a place. I enjoy that in travel with the opportunity to go and see other places and I think all of us are really more and more leaning into the power of experience.”

Hannarose McGuinness is The Register-Guard’s growth and development reporter. Contact her at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Eugene native Samara Phelps takes helm at Travel Lane County