Your Local Chamber of Commerce

Our local Chamber is a 20 yard walk down the street. We renewed our membership with them because the previous owners had a good relationship with them. However, they do not have a good reputation around town. Many local businesses are not members and have shared many complaints with us. We never thought anything about it as we occasionally get a stray referral from them. However, when we had an open house to local business owners, no one from the Chamber showed up at all. We dropped off a flyer and I spoke directly to the head of the chamber. I was very disappointed.
I am not sure what to expect from our chamber in relation to our B&B. How do you relate with your local chamber? Do you find them helpful?

Ours is so so. Used to be great with a different director. We have had so many, it is like a revolving door. Most around here are fed up with ours.

Ours runs the tourism department for the city. They are awful. There have been a few scandals with them involved including ripping off the city.

Don't have high expectations. We are between 2 chambers and 1 was useless. The other, at least we get enough website hits from them that it pays for our membership and a few extra. They seem to be more of a social club than really being an effective business organization.

We belong to the one in our town which basically only keeps a website active and the visitors center which is used mostly by those passing through for the bathroom. The cost is only $50 a year so it's worth it for the website listing. I just looked and got 1 booking through them. The other is just under $300 and they do a better job and hold more events and I got 3 reservations from them this year so I will continue. I can tell this because I have Google Analytics setup as well as Inntell-A-Keeper from Acorn.
It all depends on your members and how they all get along and who is running it. One is more professional, the other one not so much. It's sad to say but I don't really expect much from either. I tried to revive our town one and had a meeting here with a very nice dinner and wine. I got 6 people to come and 3 were other innkeepers. I tried to come up with events to hold to bring more business and the other 3 innkeepers told me that they would take part but would not help with any of the logistics to get it going. I refused to do all the work and then help fill their inns so it went no where and is now just a website.

We belong to the regional Chamber as well as the Chamber for a popular neighboring town. We found the Chamber for our town to be worthless years ago!
I don't expect anything but web space under the lodging listings on the Chamber sites we subscribe to. We have received more referrals from the B+B's in the neighboring town than from any Chamber, but we would not have know the other innkeepers if we had not belonged to their Chamber and worked to network with them. We routinely send overflow requests to them and they do the same for us.
So is it worth it? Maybe not. After the summer of 2016 I think we will drop the regional Chamber and perhaps even the neighboring town Chamber and try to focus on marketing our cottage on RBO sites. If we beef up the kitchen with an induction burner and convection toaster oven we might be able to attract the guests looking for a cozy cottage vacation rental rather than a full service B+B.

Silverspoon said:

We belong to the regional Chamber as well as the Chamber for a popular neighboring town. We found the Chamber for our town to be worthless years ago!
I don't expect anything but web space under the lodging listings on the Chamber sites we subscribe to. We have received more referrals from the B+B's in the neighboring town than from any Chamber, but we would not have know the other innkeepers if we had not belonged to their Chamber and worked to network with them. We routinely send overflow requests to them and they do the same for us.
So is it worth it? Maybe not. After the summer of 2016 I think we will drop the regional Chamber and perhaps even the neighboring town Chamber and try to focus on marketing our cottage on RBO sites. If we beef up the kitchen with an induction burner and convection toaster oven we might be able to attract the guests looking for a cozy cottage vacation rental rather than a full service B+B..

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Hmmmm sounds like we all have similar experiences. Maybe the Chamber is something that has run its course in many locations????

Our Chamber is pretty good, but unfortunately suffering from turn-over in staff right now due to half of the staff being poached by other organizations (neither were looking for another job, but both got recruited!). Hopefully we'll be able to hire some good people to replace them.... The remaining two staff are great, as well.
They run a good website that anyone interested in visiting our area is likely to end up on at some point, they publish an annual "Region Guide" and a Map, as well as organize coop advertising in other publications (notably, the state-wide tourism guide). They operate a visitor center at their offices, which is near the gateway to our area, and have a satellite "information center" downtown. They respond to a lot of inquiries from prospective and current visitors. I refer a lot people inquiring with us (who we can't accommodate for one reason or another) to them (I think they do keep track of which lodgings have availability, or at least have in the past).
They also organize a series of "Business After Hours" networking events which are quite popular. They send out a weekly e-newsletter to members; and a monthly e-newsletter aimed at tourists and sent to an extensive mailing list.
Our analytics suggest that we get a fair bit of traffic to our site from theirs, and we do get direct referrals from them now and then.

All of these sound so familiar. I think EmptyNest may be right in that Chambers have run their course.

Our County Chamber has done nothing for my City. Very few businesses belong to it. When I was new and stupid, I thought about joining until I saw the dues. Took care of that right quick. Then the Chamber came up with a special rate for B & B - ONLY $90 per year. My State Assoc dues are not much more than that. When the COUNTY Chamber starts doing for the County rather than just the County Seat and the snooty town next to it, I might consider joining. Safe bet.

Our chamber has no interest in tourism. They've even been known to torpedo efforts by our local tourism assn. (locals like me who benefit from visitors coming to town).
They have a 1960's mindset that their job is to bring factories to town. Last year 39,000 communities and cities in the U.S. competed for the 487 new factories that moved into towns. There are some good chambers out there. And a whole lot of bad ones.

We are members of the chamber in three surrounding towns and the area tourism organization. We are in a tourist area and all do promote tourism, some better than others. Do they directly do things for me/our business, well not so much, but I'm a member as they do promote the area in general and keeping the area in the mind of potential visitors is beneficial to me.

We dropped out of the chamber years ago. It has become more of a social gathering of business owners here. At one time it was a good value and we received business from it. But that was really in a time when advertising in a phone book was a must. Times have changed. The chamber is not used much anymore. When was the last time you used it when visiting a new place? Everything you need is at the tip of your fingers anytime you need it with the Internet. Younger people don't even know what it is. I actually was having a conversation with a young couple a few months ago about this. We were just talking about things of the past and how the world is changing. I asked if he had ever used the chamber of commerce. He said "No, we don't really have that much money so we just use a local bank." Then he felt really stupid when I explained what the chamber was. He thought it was a place to store money. Hahaha!

Ours is quite active with advertising worldwide. We are a tourist destination. So they keep our name out there.

I think it depends on what your Chamber's charter is. Ours is almost entirely about bringing businesses in and not about tourism at all. We have a completely separate entity that does tourism marketing.

We are a member since Grandma insists that we must be. She was on the board, etc. back in her day.... We haven't seen anything come out of it. Just checked and our place is on their first page for lodging. We also have a visitor center but it is run by a different group and they are very pro active in promoting the city and county, website, Facebook, Twitter, etc. We check them for events to tell guest what is happening in town this weekend.

We were members of our Chamber for about 10 yrs. Like many of you we got a referral here and there but nothing much for the dollars we spent being members.
Our chamber is very active but it is mainly focused on b2b referrals and local marketing, we have a separate tourism commission for our county.
As BD stated, it is more of a social club than anything else.

Morticia said:

I think it depends on what your Chamber's charter is. Ours is almost entirely about bringing businesses in and not about tourism at all. We have a completely separate entity that does tourism marketing..

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Morticia said:

...about bringing businesses in and not about tourism at all...

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Tourism IS business. Tell them I said so. That will have a huge impact.

Arks said:

Morticia said:

I think it depends on what your Chamber's charter is. Ours is almost entirely about bringing businesses in and not about tourism at all. We have a completely separate entity that does tourism marketing..

Click to expand...

Morticia said:

...about bringing businesses in and not about tourism at all...

Click to expand...

Tourism IS business. Tell them I said so. That will have a huge impact.
.

Click to expand...

Arks said:

Morticia said:

...about bringing businesses in and not about tourism at all...

Click to expand...

Tourism IS business. Tell them I said so. That will have a huge impact.

Click to expand...

There is a separate tourism group. The Chamber doesn't turn away tourists but they are not in a position (no money) to fund tourism promotion. (Believe me, this town has been around the block on this many times. The business people with deep pockets want things this way.)

We are lucky - ours fights hard for anything which supports local businesses ie we pulled together to support expanding and renovating the facilities at the Show Ground which the council was being a bit funny about - this will help bring more visitors and events to my town no question. Working on parking and traffic issues, has a separate limited company which runs the county Business to Business market and the Harrogate Christmas Market which brings something like 60,000 visitors to my town (300 coaches booked) this means a good shot in the arm for all cafe's, restaurants, shops and accommodation in the run up to christmas as Jan and Feb here are quiet. Ongoing fight for more and better trains in and out as well as a more regular service to London and back, flights into the local airport. Working with Visit Harrogate our tourism body and Welcome to Yorkshire our county tourism body to keep our name in the public eye - supporting and promoting events and donating money to them also.