Lynn Collins, the new chamber of commerce director for Maggie Valley, isn’t likely to be daunted by the turf battles or political tug-of-war over promotion dollars that have marked the tourism industry in Haywood County lately.

For 12 years, Collins oversaw a $4 million tourism promotion budget in a county with 14 chambers of commerce. She was the director of the Tourism Development Authority in Polk County, Fla. The county borders Disney World, has 17 municipalities and is the size of Rhode Island.

Collins is approaching the scenario here — where two chambers of commerce and a small handful of independent lodging groups and merchants associations fight over a whopping $600,000 in countywide tourism promotion funds — with a no-sweat attitude.

“I think it’s a matter of building partnerships and looking at the big picture,” Collins said. “The town of Maggie Valley, the Haywood Chamber, the TDA, the economic development council — we are all in it for the same thing. So we need to work on building and maintaining those relationships. I intend to work with partners on a regional basis also, anything we can do to get the most bang for the buck to stretch those dollars.”

Collins grew up in Clyde and decided to move back home to be close to her mom and to escape the “growth and the heat in central Florida,” she said. Coincidentally, the job at the Maggie Chamber of Commerce was open.

Collins has a historical perspective of tourism in Haywood County. Collins was the public relations and marketing director for Ghost Town for almost 10 years during its heyday before moving to Florida in the late 1980s. She was on the Maggie Valley Chamber board of directors and was on the county’s first Tourism Development Authority Board.

Collins said the most obvious change in the tourism scene since she moved away is that Ghost Town closed.

Three years after Ghost Town’s closure, hopes of a speedy sale and reopening of the amusement park have been dashed and replaced with a sinking realization Ghost Town might never reopen. Collins said Maggie Valley can redefine itself, however, through product development.

“It’s not to say it won’t be a challenge and it won’t take some time. It certainly won’t happen overnight, but it can happen,” Collins said. “We need to do an inventory of what we do have and what our assets are.”

Maggie Chamber members will receive a survey in the mail this week asking for feedback that could help shape a new marketing strategy.

The survey asks members to assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, aptly named a “SWOT analysis.”

“The membership is what drives this organization. It will be very valuable to me to find out what their opinions are,” said Collins. “We are here to help represent the members of this organization and look out for their best interest. We cannot do our job successfully without input and guidance from them.”

Collins said she considers research a “key ingredient.”

“You can’t know where you are going without knowing where you’ve been,” Collins said.

Filling the hole left by Ghost Town has been exacerbated by the explosion in weekly vacation home rentals that has paralleled the second-home market, plus an increase in motels.

“It means you have a larger inventory (i.e. more rooms to fill) so you have to do a better job marketing,” Collins said. “Something we are looking at right now is identifying how we might want to change our marketing strategy. We are definitely looking at niche markets and what we can do there.”

Juggling niche markets here could range from motorcyclists to fly-fishermen, but still revolve around the same basic drawing card of the mountains. At her position in Florida, one side of Collins’ county bordered Disney World and was dominated by vacation rentals that played largely to a European market. The other end of the county’s bread-and-butter belonged to the convention industry, while the middle of the county revolved around Cyprus Garden, a local attraction.

“We had lots of diverse markets,” Collins said.

With fewer diverse markets here, you can do more with less dollar-wise, Collins said. Collins said one of the best marketing tools that is currently underutilized by the Maggie chamber is the Internet, which she plans to expand. Collins said events will also be an important piece of the pie.

“Events generate overnight stays and generate business for our shops and our restaurants and everybody. The more events we can generate is a win-win situation for everyone,” Collins said.

Collins hasn’t seen any research for how the growth of vacation house rentals versus motel stays alters the tourism dynamic for this region, but based on trends in other areas, it leads to what Collins calls the “hub-and-spoke type vacation.”

“They tend to stay in one place longer and do day trips out from that,” Collins said.