Route 66 group soon will survey foreign travelers

The Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership announced this week its International Advisory Group will undertake a comprehensive International Route 66 Travelers Survey, with its first test at next month’s European Route 66 Festival in Zlin, Czech Republic.

The festival in the Czech Republic will take place Aug. 10-12.

The inaugural European Route 66 Festival took place in 2016 in Germany, attracting people from at least 10 countries, according to Route 66 author and consultant Jim Hinckley. The prospect of Route 66 Road Ahead gathering surveys from hundreds of European Route 66 enthusiasts could produce valuable data.

A news release from Route 66: The Road Ahead stated:

Following this pilot project, the survey will be launched internationally so visitors from around the globe can share their opinions. The survey will be conducted through the end of 2018, with results gathered, analyzed, and reported approximately a year from now.
Route 66 supporters presenting and testing the International Route 66 Travelers Survey at the European Route 66 Festival include Zdenek Jurasek, Dries and Marion Bessels, and Jim Hinckley. Jurasek is a long-time Route 66 promoter from the Czech Republic who helped translate the survey into his native language. The Bessels translated the Dutch and German versions of the Survey. Dries Bessels is chairman of The Road Ahead Partnership’s Route 66 International Advisory Group and also helped draft questions for the Survey. Well-known Route 66 author from Arizona, Jim Hinckley, will help promote and help conduct the Survey at the European Route 66 Festival. Jim is also a member of the Road Ahead Partnership’s Economic Development Working Group.

The survey aims to discover what challenges international travelers face along Route 66 and what they seek. Because foreign travelers make up an estimated 40 percent of visitors on Route 66, such data could prove valuable to the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership, businesses, marketers and preservationists.

The highly influential Route 66 Economic Impact Study by Rutgers University also contained a lot of important data. But the study already is six years old, and just 15 percent of its respondents came from foreign countries — a number its authors acknowledged was too low to give an exact picture of that sector.

(Image of Route 66 shields by Marcin Wichary via Flickr)