Published: August 11, 2008 10:36 am            

Tourism responds to editorial

This letter is in response to the recent editorial criticizing the Corbin Tourism Commission’s decision to remove North Corbin area hotels from its brochure.

This decision was made in hopes to direct tourists into our city limits. As Corbin Tourism, we have no tourism attractions in our city limits to capitalize on. The majority of tourists come to our area to visit Cumberland Falls and the KFC museum. A worthy goal of Corbin Tourism is to draw tourists into our city limits. By advertising South Corbin hotels, the hope is to draw tourists through town to the KFC museum. South Corbin hotels have complained that our brochure was giving free advertising to their competitors at their expense.

The brochure should highlight businesses that, in effect, pay to have it printed..

We believe our friends at Laurel County Tourism would understand our decision. They actually include North Corbin hotels on their brochure, as these hotels directly pay taxes to the London/Laurel County Tourism board. As far as regionalization goes, we look forward to partnering with our neighbors on projects and are actively doing so now. Our relationship continues to improve, but we don’t expect them to advertise hotels which benefit Corbin Tourism and vice versa.

We look forward to working with our neighbors to make this the greatest region we can, but that being said, the Corbin Tourism Commission will promote the city of Corbin as we are supposed to do.

Editorials such as this continue to make mountains out of molehills and do more to promote the hard feelings between our neighbors than any minor decision to take a few hotels off a brochure would ever do.

We have been appointed to spend our taxpayer dollars on tourism-related activities and we are doing so to the best of our ability. While everyone is entitled to an opinion, we felt it was necessary to clear up any misunderstandings on our decision. We individually are citizens of Corbin, both in and out of its limits.

We regularly visit North Corbin businesses and are proud and grateful they are there. But as board members, we have a responsibility to the businesses which are burdened with the taxes that fund us.

We welcome any visitors to our monthly meetings on the second Monday of the moth at noon, and any ideas to help grow tourism for our area.

The Corbin Tourism Commission

        

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