Discover Long Island has been the steadfast stewards of the Long Island tourism industry for decades now, enticing people to visit the unique wonders the region and a bid to assist the local economy and the many hard-working residents who depend upon it each and every day.
And to that end, the organization has made a point of constantly evolving and reinventing itself, embracing technology in the form of a recent comprehensive website redesign and a cutting-edge new smartphone app that literally puts everything that Long Island has to offer at the tips of your fingers.
Kristen Reynolds, President and CEO of Discover Long Island, said that the primary mission of Discover Long Island is to promote the brand of Long Island for the purpose of luring visitors to its shores.
“One of the reasons we do that is a lot of people don’t understand what tourism actually is. Most people think about tourism as being what they want to do on Long Island as a resident, which is certainly a component of it. But primarily, what we try to do is bring outside visitors in for the purposes of economic development,” she said. “It’s new money into the region that people spend freely while they’re visiting, and then they leave and we don’t have to educate them, or fill their potholes, or build libraries for them. This is why tourism is such a global, competitive industry…it provides a quick and significant amount of revenue that a lot of places use to keep the taxes of their residents lower.”
Discover Long Island has been around since 1978; for the first 37 years of its existence, it was called the Long Island Convention and Visitors Bureau and Sports Commission – a real mouthful, to be sure – and when Reynolds came in and took the reins of power, one of the first decisions she made as President and CEO was to bestow a new moniker upon the organization.
“I moved here for the position from Arizona about 9 years ago, and we rebranded as Discover Long Island. It’s what needed to happen, it needed to be a call to action, and people needed to understand what we do,” she said. “Plus, it was interesting that we were a convention and visitors bureau and we didn’t have a convention center, nor did we have any professional sports at the time because the Islanders weren’t here on Long Island. It didn’t communicate who we were or what our mission was, so with the rebrand we’ve implemented a lot of innovative strategies, and we’re now a globally award-winning organization and Long Island tourism is now a $6.6 billion annual industry.”
Discover Long Island helps promote the local tourism industry in a variety of ways. They primarily function as a destination marketing and relationship-building organization – both nationally and internationally – but they also engage in sales, meetings, and a plethora of other initiatives to serve their ultimate goal: making Long Island the premier destination for tourism each and every year, an endeavor that they are enormously successful at.
However, that all changed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, as the mass shutdowns implemented by governments to curb the spread of the virus effectively put a halt to the tourism industry. But every setback is a setup for a comeback, and it was during this period, Reynolds said, that the organization strove to reinvent itself to stay abreast of the changing times and emerge from the pandemic stronger than ever.
“Before the pandemic, we were using traditional and digital marketing to help people want to put Long Island on their bucket list, and it was working amazingly well. Obviously during COVID, that all stopped. So instead, we transformed during that time into a content creation organization,” she said. “We delved into a new kind of media, which is known as ‘owned media.’ In the past it was ‘paid media,’ then there was ‘earned media,’ which is PR, and now the term is ‘owned media,’ which means original content.”
In their new role as a content-generating organization, Discover Long Island became a morale builder and storyteller for local residents during the pandemic.
“We really started talking a lot to our locals, and let them know that if they had to be on lockdown somewhere and unable to travel, how lucky are we to be able to live in a place that has all of these incredible assets?” Reynolds said. “And since we’ve reopened up, we are still charged even now with being an asset for our local residents, as well as for those incoming visitors that we are now bringing in once again to benefit our businesses.”
Discover Long Island now has 11 different social media channels with an audience of over 10 million followers globally, cementing their role as influencers, both locally and around the world. In addition, the organization launched a brand-new website in 2023 that encompasses even more of that great “owned media” content, including a weekly podcast called “Long Island Tea.”
Another evolution of Discover Long island’s business model comes in the form of a newly developed, cutting-edge smartphone app that basically puts anything and everything you could ever want to know about or do on Long Island at the tips of your fingers.
“We talked to a local company called GettinLocal that had some really incredible proprietary technology that made an app a real tool instead of just another version of your website, which is what most other apps are,” Reynolds said. “The app launched earlier this year, and it’s meant to be a tactical transactional tool for both residents and visitors.”
“What it does that’s really different and unique is that it uses mobile geo location, so wherever your phone is on Long Island, it pulls information directly from our website to find things near your physical location,” Reynolds elaborated. “When using our app, it’s not a guessing game anymore. You don’t have to know where you’re going or what town you’re in, which county, which village, how to build an itinerary. You just turn on your app wherever you are, and it will pull up things to do near you, where to shop, where events are located, and it changes based on your location.”
The app is free and available for both Apple and Android mobile devices, and Reynolds notes that they have been averaging 1,000 downloads per month with large surges of scans at consumer activations, making the program a home-run success.
“It’s terrific, because when people download the app, we’re able to get information such as who’s coming here, where they’re coming from, how are they utilizing the app, and it helps us in developing the content that they need,” she said. “We utilize the app as a great tool for activations, which can increase app downloads by as much as 1,000 percent. We just did an activation recently at the Jones Beach Air Show and people could just walk up and download the QR code for the app, and it’s basically like an on-the-go visitor center that stays in your pocket wherever you go. And it’s refreshed every 24 hours, so whatever is being uploaded to our website – events, happy hour deals, and so on – it really puts the latest information right at your fingertips.”
Reynolds also noted that there are plans to create specified apps for major upcoming Long Island events, such as the Ryder Cup in 2025 and the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.
Ultimately, Reynolds said that Discover Long Island is dedicated to improving the lives of local residents by keeping a continuous flow of tourists – and their dollars – coming to the region, and it’s a mission that they will steadfastly remain committed to for years to come.
“The national average is, for every $100 that someone spends on a hotel room, they spend $221 in the local community,” she said. “We’re bringing visitors from outside the region and they’re staying at our hotels, that is really benefiting our local mom-and-pop bagel stores and pizza shops and those downtown businesses that survive on that revenue.”
To find out more about Discover Long Island and their mission, please visit https://www.discoverlongisland.com.
