Tourism is a team effort and the visitor always comes first.

Those were the messages delivered to local business owners, marketers, town and state officials who attended a meeting Tuesday aimed at streamlining and boosting Wareham's tourism industry.

"We want to make this town more than just a gateway but a destination," said Bruce Hutchins, the chairman of the Beach and Tourism Committee, which played host for the meeting. The meeting took place at the new Rosebrook Events Center, which is adjacent to the TowneSuites Marriott hotel that opened on April 3.

The keynote speaker at the event was Paul Cripps, the executive director of Destination Plymouth County, a non-profit organization that promotes the tourism industry in Plymouth. He said getting the hotels, restaurants, retailers and other businesses on the same page was the first step toward building a successful destination management organization. He said that developing private partnerships was also key to supplementing public resources.

“You have to streamline your efforts to put the money in the right direction,” he said.

Cripps said that collaboration and communication between groups is key to having an effective organization. He said it was important to eliminate redundancies so that people don’t have to choose or become confused between multiple groups, brochures, websites and things of that nature.

The meeting was also an opportunity to showcase the new website -Discover Wareham- which showcases many of the tourism, leisure and special event opportunities in town.

Members from the Onset Bay Association, Wareham Village Association, representatives of A.D. Makepeace, town officials and State Rep. Susan Williams Gifford were all on hand at the meeting.

The Beach and Tourism Committee saw the meeting as a way to gather interested parties and try to foster business relationships that could lead to the creation of a tourism group for Wareham, similar to Destination Plymouth.

"This is our first effort to try and get a lot of people together who are interested in tourism to see what we're doing and to get involved," Teitelbaum said. “The Beach and Tourism Committee has a lot of partners in place, we just need to get them in one place.”