What Eclipseville, USA Learned From Hosting a Once-in-a-Lifetime Event
Photo Credit: Hopkinsville, Kentucky was the point of greatest eclipse during the total solar eclipse that spanned the U.S. on August 21. Pictured are eclipse watchers wearing eclipse glasses during the event. Flickr / NASA Marshall Photo Archive
Skift Take
For a small town, Hopkinsville, Kentucky has some big-time lessons on how to plan and host a mass tourism event that will only happen once. The town is still figuring out how to use the positive PR to its advantage and how it can convince some of the eclipse chasers to come back.
Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a small town of about 33,000, isn't typically on most travelers' bucket lists or even radars. But for a few days last month, the town was the center of the universe when it found itself with what officials believe was more than 100,000 visitors seeking the path of totality of a total solar eclipse.
Dubbed "Eclipseville" by Visit Hopkinsville, the town's tourism board, the total solar eclipse on Aug. 21 only lasted two minutes and forty seconds. But town and tourism officials had been planning for the rare celestial event for nearly a decade.
Planning for an event with a magnitude of the eclipse – the first to cross the entire continental United States since 1918 and the first visible from the U.S. since 1979 – wasn't something the town was accustomed to. It wasn't until the tourism board received an email on June 1, 2007, from a vendor who wanted to be involved with eclipse festivities that it discovered it would be the town closest to the greatest
