Gananoque Chamber of Commerce

by Lisa Wells, Executive Director 1000 Islands Gananoque Chamber of Commerce – November 6, 2013

(Gananoque, ON) The 1000 Islands Gananoque Chamber of Commerce is a business network whose goal is to further the interests of businesses in the form of advocacy, education, business development, training and benefits. Our mission is to promote and improve trade and commerce and the cultural, civic, and social well-being of our region.

In this economic climate and in a region such as ours, it makes more sense to have a neutral party manage both tourism and business related matters as it is not financially viable to have two separate organizations do so. Accordingly, the Chamber has two roles: one whose focus is on business and the second as the region’s Destination Marketing Organization. To facilitate this undertaking, four years ago the Chamber began running both functions as two separate businesses – two budgets, two billing cost centres, two websites and separate boards of directors.

With the privilege of being the Destination Marketing Organization, we have the responsibility to encourage the development of the tourism industry in the community and educate the community about the value of tourism. We also provide accurate, helpful and high quality general and detailed information on attractions and visitor services, promote local attractions, events, tourism opportunities which motivate visitors to stay longer and spend more money in the community, and promote return visits to the community. We also collect visitor data to determine who visitors are, their origin, their destination, their activities, their length of stay and their needs.

The Chamber was in negotiations with the Town of Gananoque and the Township of Leeds and the Thousand Islands to develop a plan for tourism for the region. The Town of Gananoque and the Township of Leeds and Thousand Islands announced that they have walked away from those negotiations. Despite this unfortunate turn of events, the 1000 Islands Gananoque Chamber of Commerce is prepared to provide tourism services on its own and in conjunction with the tourism businesses that are part of the Chamber of Commerce. These include tourism operators, tourism organizations, major attractions and other Chambers
of Commerce.

For the past few months the Chamber of Commerce has been working on promoting the region with new technology, which includes a new and improved Tourism Website which is set to be launched in the next few days. We will continue to produce the Visitor’s Guide and the redesigned 2014 edition is scheduled for publication mid-to-late January 2014. We will also be expanding on our tourism education programs which include familiarization tours, in-house frontline training, and customer service skills training.

Rest assured the 1000 Islands Gananoque Chamber of Commerce will continue to provide uninterrupted tourism services now, throughout the 2014 tourism season and beyond.

1000 Islands Gananoque Chamber of Commerce

The 1000 Islands Gananoque Chamber of Commerce has the task of promoting business, industry and a sense of community within an area that almost sells itself. The Chamber covers Gananoque and the Township of Leeds and the Thousand Islands, including the villages of Seeleys Bay, Lyndhurst, Lansdowne, Rockport and Ivy Lea and all points in between.

The formal objective of the 1000 Islands Gananoque Chamber of Commerce is to promote and improve trade and commerce and the cultural, civic and social well-being of the district served by this organization.

For additional information, contact Lisa Wells, lisa@1000islandsganchamber.com.