Robert Billington, president of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council, will be spending next week in Dubai, where they have transformed a desert town into a multimillion-dollar international tourism resort.

It will be a familiar story.

Billington is traveling there to attend the annual meeting of the World Tourism and Trade Council to find out if the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council will be the winner of the international tourism business group’s Destination Award for 2008.

The council is made up of 100 chief executive officers and or chairs of such international tourism companies as Marriott hotels, British Airways, the Disney Co.’s parks and resorts and American Express. Its Destination Award goes to a town or region that has demonstrated success in incorporating social, cultural, environmental and economic factors into development through a “multi-stakeholder process.”

The Blackstone council is up against the Rinjani Trek Ecotourism Programme of Indonesia and the Town of Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada. Bouctouche is a coastal town on the New Brunswick coast that has worked to incorporate the varied ecosystems along its shore and inland into its tourism and economic planning.

Rinjani Trek is based on the Indonesian island of Lombok. Through a joint effort by the Indonesian government, island officials and local businesses, a variety of hikes and walks are offered through a 102,000-acre national park.

“Think ‘tourism destination’ and the image that comes to mind is not likely to be a place known for its polluted rivers, abandoned businesses, high unemployment and disenfranchised local communities,” said Costas Christ, chairman of the WTTC’s judging committee and global travel editor for National Geographic. “Yet, that is exactly what the Blackstone River Valley was when local community members launched the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council in 1985.”

Christ said the Blackstone Valley council was a catalyst in a years-long campaign that brought together environmentalists, historic preservationists, businesses and government to reinvent a polluted and ignored river as the central theme of a regional tourism campaign that has evolved into a more general economic development plan.

“Working with a wide range of multi-stakeholders, the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council has shown that tourism can play a valuable role in helping to revitalize a downtrodden economy and bring back a river once declared ‘dead’ to the benefit of local people, business, and nature,” Christ said.

“Through a destination stewardship approach to economic development, including the preservation of the area’s natural, cultural and historical heritage, Blackstone Valley Tourism Council has succeeded in helping to rebuild a sense of pride among communities in the Blackstone Valley and linking its history to new economic opportunities,” he added.

Billington said the Blackstone Valley council’s nomination was an industry validation of the approach that the council and other groups, agencies and organizations in the valley have taken.

“It’s the largest private sector tourism organization in the world,” Billington said. “The Marriotts, the Virgin Airlines, it’s the world, the largest corporations you can imagine.”

Christ said the Destination Award is intended to note areas that have developed tourism programs that look to work with their locale’s environment, history and culture, rather than try to reinvent it. He specifically noted the council’s co-called Sustainable Tourism Plan, which seeks to preserve the region’s physical heritage, such as its mill buildings through redevelopment, and it natural resources through projects such as the bike path along the Blackstone River.

“In the 1700s and 1800s, no one was thinking about sustainability,” Billington said. “They extracted as much as they could and let everything else go.” And when the New England mill industry collapsed, they had no alternatives for economic development.

The idea of sustainability is to find new uses for old buildings that will keep them in usable condition, Billington said. When old mills are converted into condominiums or apartments, that will preserve them for the future, when economic conditions may force yet another change in their use, Billington said.

Billington said the key to the success of the plan was for the Blackstone Valley to know its place and not try to be something it wasn’t.

“We’re building on the authenticity of the place,” he said. “We’re not chasing the next waterslide. Whatever we do, it’s got to fit. It’s got to be authentic.”

jhill@projo.com