Group 5, Walkabout #5 Group Post: Visit Salt Lake

For our fifth walkabout, Group 5 studied up on the Visit Salt Lake website: www.visitsaltlake.com. Unlike our other walkabouts, this one did not require that we go outside or walk around Salt Lake, but we learned something about the city in the process, particularly in the way Visit Salt Lake markets itself. For our “walkabout,” we all got together in our floor lounge and discussed our individual observations about the site, and the same things tended to stick out to us. First of all, Visit Salt Lake attempts to dispel tourists’ fears that Salt Lake City is so religious that it can’t be fun; the website plays into stereotypes assuming that they are taken seriously by non-natives. For instance, the front page prominently features photos of an African-American family and three guys drinking beer in a bar. To many, including most of our group, “Salt Lake City” suggests lots of white people who don’t drink alcohol, and Visit Salt Lake clearly knows this. Consequently, the website seeks to confound typical expectations of what Salt Lake City has to offer. However, Visit Salt Lake’s target demographic being middle- to upper-class Americans who can afford to travel for pleasure, the site maintains a mainstream appeal and avoids the “edginess” of sites like Craft Sabbath and SLUG. Essentially, Visit Salt Lake serves as one gigantic advertisement. The majority of the website consists of links to other websites that fall under such broad categories as “Things to Do,” “Places to Stay,” “Restaurants & Bars,” “Getting Around,” and so forth. As you can imagine, the number of links is impressive but also so great that the site is not actually as helpful as it could be. Nevertheless, of particular interest is the portion of the site under the tab “Ski,” as it provides lots of useful information about local ski resorts and the sport that brings so many people to Utah.