Three not-for-profit travel and tourism groups are pooling their resources to sell out-of-state visitors on Southern New England. A Visitor’s Guide to Providence and Southern New England debuting this spring is a collaboration of the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau, the Warwick Division of Tourism and the Rhode Island Airport Corporation.
The quarterly, magazine-style guide, to be published by Rhode Island Monthly Communications, Inc., will include obligatory restaurant, lodging, sight-seeing and event listings. However, it will also feature a detailed airport map and flight schedules for airlines serving T.F. Green Airport. That information – already provided the corporation by the airlines – will be “stitched in” to the publication, making it available to the public for the first time, said Patti Horan Doyle, a vice president for the RDW Group. The Providence communications company handles public relations for both the CVB and the Airport Corporation.
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Half of the 300,000 guides to be published in April will be made available at an existing information booth on the airport’s ground floor, as well as two under construction near the security check point and airline ticket counters. The remaining copies will be distributed at the CVB and the Warwick Division of Tourism at Warwick City Hall, Doyle said.
“This really is going to meet an unmet need,” Doyle said. “Right now, when visitors come in and out of the airport, they don’t have anything readily at their disposal.”
John Palumbo, publisher for Rhode Island Monthly Communications, said the majority of the publication’s content will remain the same throughout the year. Only the flight information and maps will be updated every three months, as needed. Each of the four issues will have a different cover, too, he said.
The guide is really the by-product of a one-time project by Rhode Island Monthly for the CVB, Palumbo said. All 50,000 copies of the Visitors Guide to Providence and Southern New England published in February and distributed through CVB member organizations ran out within a month, Palumbo said.
“That showed us that the demand was there,” he said. “All the indicators are there is a really strong niche market for this kind of publication.”
What didn’t make sense, Palumbo and Doyle said, was to have several publications with overlapping content and the same target audience.
“It just makes sense for non-profits to pool all their resources in terms of finances and staff,” Doyle said.
Revenue from advertisements is expected to cover most of the costs of producing and publishing the guide, Palumbo said, adding “I’ve also talked to the Airport Corporation about their willingness to subsidize the quarterly flight guide along with the airlines.”
“We haven’t finalized all of the details on the actual financing of it,” he said.
The sales staff at Rhode Island Monthly Communications has started marketing the publication to advertisers, Palumbo said. However, rates have yet to be fixed.
The working rate is $3,000 a year for a full-page black-and-white ad, he said, adding that variations should be affordable to both large and small restaurants, retailers and other advertisers
The Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, which almost a year ago launched a similar guide in conjunction with America House Communications of Newport, is going ahead with plans to publish the 1999 Rhode Island Travel Guide next month, according to David C. DePetrillo, tourism director for the EDC.
The EDC’s publication, unlike the upcoming Visitors Guide to Providence and Southern New England, is aimed at people pondering a vacation or perhaps even a move here, DePetrillo said. As such, it includes fewer lists and more articles and information about opportunities, from the statewide film commission to business relocation assistance.
It dovetails with a similarly themed print and Internet advertising campaign, he added.
The 200,000 copies of the EDC guide will be distributed by mail among the hundreds of thousands of people who phone the organization each year, DePetrillo said.
