By Rashleigh MacFarlane

There are red faces at Visit Cornwall, the tourism promotion and lobbying company, after its website disappeared from the internet during what should have been one of the busiest periods of the so-called “visitor economy.”

The website, arguably the single most tangible service provided by Visit Cornwall, was down for eight days during the recent August bank holiday, denying many members the opportunity to market last-minute offers.

A tech-blunder also lost many of the promotional images used by Visit Cornwall members.  The organisation is now appealing to its members to resubmit photos so that the website can be rebuilt.

Visit Cornwall members pay to have their hotels and guest houses listed, and to promote various festivals or events which they hope will attract more tourists.

Now an email sent by Visit Cornwall to those members says:  “As you know, our website has been offline due to an unexpected subcontractor change….

“We have been able to recover most of the site’s content from an earlier back-up and the website will be re-instated today in order to retain our favourable Google ranking.

“Because this back-up was not fully up-to-date, the team is now working to update all content, with member listings our first priority.

“Some images were unfortunately lost or could not be restored at a high enough resolution.  Please bear with us until the end of next week while we complete updates to listings, after which we will begin adding seasonal content such as your offers and events.”

Cornwall Reports is keen to find out more about the “expected subcontractor change…”  Readers with more information are invited to get in touch.

Recent months have seen Visit Cornwall record a number of changes to its top management.  Once part of Cornwall Council, ten years ago it theoretically became a private-sector organisation.

Documents filed at Companies House show that managing director Michael Steel stepped down from the organisation on 13th August.

Long-serving Malcolm Bell, founder of Visit Cornwall in 2015 and whose “retirement” has been announced several times in recent years, finally stepped down as a board secretary on the same day.

In June, a senior Cornwall Council official, Emily Kent, whose job title is “Head of Economy,” joined the Visit Cornwall board.

Visit Cornwall is a not-for-profit community interest company.  Its most recent published accounts show it spent more than £263,000 in “administrative expenses” last year and made a loss for the financial year of £3,600.

Visit Cornwall appears to have eight employees.

Some members of Visit Cornwall are now grumbling about the value of the organisation.  The importance of its website and the consequence of its sudden disappearance at such a crucial time of the year cannot be exaggerated.

Last year Visit Cornwall promised its members:  “After a lot of work updating and refreshing the content, the Visit Cornwall website http://www.visitcornwall.com transferred on to the new platform providing fresh content and improving navigation to town and area pages, and importantly for our member listings and pages offering the best of Cornwall on the leading tourism website for Cornwall.

“Over 55% of visitors access the site via a mobile phone, a slight reduction on last year

“The Offers and Late Availability pages have been continually promoted by the Visit Cornwall team and have received just over 102,832 page views in the last 12 months along with 54,883 active users.

“Overall, the website had around 7.6 million page views and was visited by just under 3 million visitors (about 8% drop on last year).

“Around 53% of users are female and most users are between 25 and 54 years of age.

“Only circa 13% are below 25, slightly increased on last year. English speaking nations remain the most popular visitors to the website, alongside German visitors.

“Away from the English-speaking nations. Visitcornwall.com is one of the top 5 tourist websites in the country and is used by over 25% of all visitors to Cornwall.”

Tensions within Visit Cornwall, disputes over competence and value-for-money, the recent closure of long-running tourist attractions such as Dairyland and Flambards, the organisation’s relationship with the public sector (particularly County Hall,) fears of a Spanish-style anti-tourism backlash and more rigorous scrutiny of its claimed contribution to Cornwall’s economy all point towards further instability in the short-term.

rashleighmacfarlane@cornwallreports.co.uk