Westerly Chamber Boss Asks Commerce’s Wall and Pryor to Put Westerly in RI’s Tourism Video

Saturday, April 02, 2016

GoLocalProv News Team

Westerly is the home to one of America’s best beaches, some of the East Coast’s finest summer homes, and has enough summer attractions to make Taylor Swift buy a summer home in the town.  Commerce Corp functionally forgot to include it in the state’s video according to Westerly Chamber’s Lisa Konicki.

An email from Konicki to Commerce’s Stefan Pryor and Betsy Wall pointed out that Iceland was in the video and Westerly was not.  “Please replace the footage of the skateboarder in Iceland with video footage of our beautiful Westerly beaches. The beaches are conspicuously missing from the promotional video yet we have the most incredible beaches on the East Coast,” wrote Konicki.

The Westerly Chamber head went on to write, “Boston Globe just recognized Misquamicut Beach as one of the 10 best in the nation today. Other than a quick shot of our downtown wayfinding signs, Westerly in missing from the video.”

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Konicki heads the  “Ocean Community Chamber of Commerce," which the Westerly Chamber of Commerce was renamed in 2015 “to better represent the geographic area served, be more inclusive, and to be less cumbersome.”

This is just the latest in errors tied to the launch of the state of Rhode Island's tourism campaign. From film footage of Iceland, to questionable $400,000 logos, to more than 100 errors on the website, to use of out of state contractors -- some without being selected through a public process -- the campaign and its leadership are under tremendous public ridicule. 

Westerly is home to the Ocean House Hotel — constantly ranked globally as one of the best hotels in the United States. Westerly’s Watch Hill area is among the most affluent summer communities in America and home to not only Swift, but also Conan O’Brien.

It seems impossible that Westerly’s beaches and the iconic flying horse carousel, which has been located in Watch Hill since 1879 and is on the list of the National Historic Landmarks, were left out. According to the Department of the Interior, Rhode Island has just under two percent of all of America’s federally designated historic landmarks.

Konicki in her email does congratulate Commerce in that the errors in the tourism campaign has gotten Rhode Island lots of attention on CNN and HuffPost.

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