Posted: June 25, 2010

By Bill Cresenzo

bill.cresenzo@insidebiz.com

Virginia Senate Minority Leader Thomas Norment last week criticized the new Williamsburg Tourist Information Center, saying it was ill-conceived.

Meanwhile, the center's director announced the center is abandoning plans to seek public money and will provide its own funding.

"I respect the initiators of the Greater Williamsburg Tourist Information Center are tenacious and will persist in fragmenting what should be a unified, collaborative effort to promote the Historic Triangle as a distinct destination market," Norment said in a four-page letter faxed to Inside Business. "On this issue of the Greater Williamsburg Tourist Information Center, they are tenaciously wrong!"

Norment, R-3rd District, sent the letter in response to a June 14 report in Inside Business on the lack of support in some circles for the new tourist information center, which opened in the spring on U.S. Route 60, and a lack of interstate directional signs for the center because it has not gotten approval from the Virginia Tourism Corp.

The organization said it rejected the center's bid for certification as an official Virginia visitors center because the center did not include letters of support in its application. The center is operated by the Williamsburg Hotel and Motel Association.

The Greater Williamsburg Chamber & Tourist Alliance and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation have refused to endorse the center.

Norment, who calls himself a "tireless advocate for Virginia's tourism industry" who created the Virginia Tourism Corp. as an agency, said the idea behind the tourist center "was spearheaded by several individuals who have been extremely outspoken and critical of the overall marketing approach of the Historic Triangle as a tourism destination.

"Remarkably, this facility opened without any prior discussion with the Greater Williamsburg Chamber & Tourism Alliance, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Busch Gardens, Water Country, The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, the county of York, the county of James City or the city of Williamsburg or any of the elected officials associated therewith."

Priscilla Caldwell, the new center's director who started her job after the center opened, conceded that hotel and motel association officials planned the center without everyone's input.

"My understanding is that they did not have consultation during the planning of the center with some of those entities," Caldwell said. "In retrospect, perhaps there should have been consultation earlier. This process may have had some flaws, but this concept is a good one."

Sanford Wanner, the administrator of James City County, said that he first heard of the new center on March 8, when he met with the hotel and motel association's executive director, L. Alvin Garrison, and its president, Chris Canavos. Wanner said he met with the two in his capacity as chairman of the Historic Triangle Collaborative, a group of county administrators and business and education leaders that meets to foster economic development in the area.

"I met with them at their office," Wanner said. "At that point they informed me of what they were doing. I said at that time, 'Have you talked with anyone else about this?' They said, 'No, do you think that's important?' I said, 'Yeah.'"

Garrison was out of the country and Canavos did not respond by press time.

Norment said the most shocking element of the center's business plan was the association's plan to run the center with its own money for a year, then ask for money from city of Williamsburg and from James City and York counties to support it.

Christie Phillips, a spokeswoman for York County, said that while she "can't nail down when exactly they had discussions with the county, I can tell you we haven't received any official correspondence" for the center.

"The county is not planning to give the tourist information center money, but we never had any plans to," she said. "We told them all along we didn't have the funds available. The county generally supports marketing efforts that promote the area, and we encourage the group to work with others in the region."

The center has scrapped plans to ask for money from the counties and the city of Williamsburg, Caldwell said.

"This was originally conceived as a pilot program and the association would underwrite it for one year," she said. " We have revisited that model and are now prepared and committed to fund the center indefinitely. And we have the resources to do it."

The center also has letters of support from at least eight Virginia legislators and many businesses, Caldwell said. The area needs the center because it is right off Interstate 64 and offers tourists information and reservations for all Williamsburg attractions, including Colonial Williamsburg, Caldwell said.

She said that while the Colonial Williamsburg center does a fabulous job of promoting Colonial Williamsburg, the new center fills a gap by promoting the entire area. It sells tickets to more than 15 attractions and makes reservations to more than 65 hotels and motels. It's also located near gas stations, hotels and restaurants, for tourists who are traveling through the area, but not necessarily to Colonial Williamsburg.

For its part, Colonial Williamburg's visitors center sells tickets to Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown Settlement, Historic Jamestowne, Yorktown, Yorktown Victory Center and Water Country, spokesman Tom Shrout said, adding that the center has a large map directing tourists to attractions that are not affiliated with Colonial Williamsburg, such as Ripley's Believe It Or Not. However, the Colonial Williamsburg center does not sell tickets to the other attractions.

The center makes reservations only for hotels affiliated with Colonial Williamsburg.

Mitch Nichols, the president of Nichols Tourism Group, who, in 2005, authored a report on tourism in the Historic Triangle, said the dispute surrounding the new center isn't unusual.

"I don't think you can look at this additional visitors center as either a good thing or a bad thing," he said. "As in most instances, it's all a function of how it all fits in a broader environment. In our work around the country, we point to Colonial Williamsburg as having one of the best visitors centers in the nation."

That doesn't mean there isn't room for another, Nichols said. But for success, the centers would need to work in tandem, and not be seen as competitors. In an industry where different groups jockey for position - the hotel and motel association, the chamber of commerce, the restaurant association - disputes happen.

"You'd want to have these multiple organizations come together and work in cooperative ways," he said. "That was one of the challenges we found when we were there a few years ago. That sort of cohesion was not at the level that we thought it should be."