The Utah Tourism Red Emerald initiative is an internal guiding document to help us prioritize our promotional and product development efforts toward creating Utah travel experiences that are rarified, distinctive, unique to Utah and highly coveted. The principles in the Utah Tourism Red Emerald initiative focus on attracting quality visitors who stay longer, spend more and engage more deeply with the local community, distributing traveler visitation throughout Utah and encouraging a community-led vision for tourism development.
This document contains our guiding principles for the Utah Tourism Red Emerald strategy. First introduced at the 2017 Utah Tourism Conference in September, it has quickly become the tool for prioritizing our internal efforts and aligning with stakeholders.
About the name: The Wah Wah mountains of western Utah are one of the only places in the world to find red emeralds. Also known as Red Beryl, these rare and highly coveted gemstones are found in Utah and New Mexico, but only grow to any substantial size in Utah. They are distinctive, rare and highly sought after, prized by gemologists.