From whitewater rafting in rural Maine to wine tasting and sailing in Newport, visitors to New England have hundreds of options and can fill an itinerary for an entire year thanks to a Web site launched by Mystic Media Inc.
The site, VisitNewEngland.com, is actually 12 Web sites in one. Micro sites are built in for all six New England states that offer loads of tourism information for visitors and links to activities, places to visits, and off-beat tips that only the locals would know.
The Ocean State and the Bay State alone have 150 great things to do between them, according to their micro sites, which are owned by the Warwick-based company.
Jonathan Lhowe, president of Mystic Media Inc., formed the company in 1993 to start a weekly newspaper in Mystic, Conn.
Just four years later the newspaper publisher had the vision to start an Internet-based travel and tourism Web site and launched visitmystic.com.
“Netscape came about and I said let’s set up a Web site for the newspaper and for Mystic,” Lhowe recalled. “The graphics back then were rude and crude.”
As a newspaperman, Lhowe did not believe in the theory of ‘if you build it they will come.’ Instead he believed that if he developed an audience he would find advertisers to link to that audience.
“What was interesting early on was the [bread-and-breakfast businesses] were quick to catch on and a lot were savvy to see that if ‘I pay upfront this is a cheap way to advertise,’” Lhowe said.
The text-intensive site took on form and within just a few years and with a single designer, Lhowe began working on VisitNewEngland.com, which serves as a one-stop shop for travel destinations throughout the region.
“It took us 15 minutes to come up with the idea for Visit New England,” he said.
The company went from having one Web site to having six in just one year.
“Travel was second to pornography [on the Internet] and it made so much sense to do your travel planning this way,” he said.
And tourism continues to be a good market to tap.
Tourism and travel generates $2.17 billion for the Rhode Island economy and is the second largest industry in the state supporting nearly 64,000 jobs and $5 billion in spending in 2006, according to the R.I. Economic Development Corporation.
In Massachusetts more than 20 million visitors spent approximately $14.2 billion in the state making tourism the third largest industry for the Bay State, according to the Massachusetts Office on Travel and Tourism. The industry, according to MOTT, generated $887.2 million in tax revenue and supported 125,800 jobs in 2006.
Those visitors are making Lhowe’s job easier.
Today, the six main micro sites – one for each state – found on the VisitNewEngland site are supported 100 percent by advertising. Currently, the company has nearly 900 advertisers.
If you are looking for that perfect romantic getaway, Lhowe said his Web sites link you to several ideas and provide you with the links to romantic getaway packages.
Links to kids’ trails, food, foliage, fishing, mansions and much more are also found.
For those interested in agriculture and for those ecologically and socially conscious individuals, VisitNewEngland.com has a special section dedicated to agritourism and ecotourism.
“By no means do we have every event and every activity on the site,” Lhowe said. “But we try to cover everything from northern Maine to Fairfield County in Connecticut.”
Since launching the Web sites in 1997, Mystic Media has been adding new features, including photography tips from Kodak, weather updates from The Weather Channel and various featured topics of interest.
Mystic Media strives for the perfect balance of providing hundreds of pages of content while not overwhelming visitors, 70 percent of whom are females, to the Web sites.
The Web sites, though rich with content, are always a work in progress, Lhowe said. Still, he anticipates a combined three million unique visitors to the sites this year.
VisitRI.com, the micro Web site focused on just Little Rhody, is not the only tourism site focused on Rhode Island.
VisitRhodeIsland.com, supported and promoted by the R.I. Island Tourism Division, is the state’s official tourism Web site.
There has been some confusion to visitors of both sites, according to David DePetrillo, director of the R.I. Tourism Division.
“I had a call just yesterday from someone who couldn’t find an event on the private site and was calling us,” DePetrillo said.
There is no association between the two Rhode Island Web sites.
“Our Web site is the official site … and we promote that through advertising and public relations,” DePetrillo added.
Asked if there would ever be a time when the Web sites would be linked or work together DePetrillo said: “That would be up to the private site to link to us.”
Currently, the State of New Hampshire and various state tourism associations advertise with Mystic Media.
Looking back, Lhowe is happy with what he has developed.
“It was the best idea I’d ever had,” he said. •
