MATT GENTRY The Roanoke Times

Aradia Zenobia stands in front of the historic Cambria depot in Christiansburg, one of the locations she would like to promote to visitors.

The Roanoke Times | File 2006

Aradia Zenobia talks with Radford University chamber intern Brad Johnson in the chamber's former office in the New River Valley Mall in Christiansburg.

| Amy Matzke-Fawcett

amy.matzke-fawcett@roanoke.com, 381-1674

Aradia Zenobia says she's never been afraid to take criticism or advice, which will serve her well in her new job as head of the newly formed New River Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Zenobia served as acting president of the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce after former president Shane Adams left amid allegations of embezzlement in June. He has yet to be charged with a crime.

The chamber's board of directors hired Catherine Sutton in December to fill the director's position.

Zenobia plans to leave the chamber to form the New River Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau, a group she says will promote tourism in the area.

Promoting tourism was part of her job at the chamber, but it ended when Montgomery County, Christiansburg and Blacksburg pulled their tourism contributions to the chamber after the allegations against Adams surfaced.

"This is something we've ostensibly been working on for three years," she said "We've just barely scratched the surface of what we can do in this area."

Q Why does this area need a convention and visitors bureau?

A I think we have a tremendous amount of potential here that needs a guiding force to take advantage of it. Right now we always say we have great recreation. But, where does somebody go to take advantage of that [who is] new to the area ... visiting the area? How do they know where to go biking, where to go hiking, where to go rock climbing, that sort of thing? A convention and visitors bureau can be a centralized location. We can have tour guides and brochures and maps and suggestions that other places probably have a little bit of, but when you have someplace that's concentrating on that, it's not just helter-skelter, it's actually good information that's available.

And it's available to locals as well so it feeds on itself, because if somebody just asks a local, "Where's a good place to go?" they know and everybody's on the same page rather than just randomly sending them different places.

And that's one of our goals, we want to have, for lack of a better word, training. We want to be able to get with front-line people at lodgings, at restaurants, at businesses, so that we can give them information, we can help inform them, help train them about what is in the this area and how to take advantage of it.

Q It's called the New River Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau, but it seems to so far focus on Montgomery County, Blacksburg and Christiansburg. Do you have a plan to get the whole area involved and marketed?

A It's important to know the name is not a reference to trying to take over tourism in the New River Valley.

What our intention is, is to say that we realized that you can't sell one portion of the valley without selling it all. And we want to develop partnerships, and we're well on our way to doing so, with other people in the region because Montgomery County has the bulk of lodging and restaurants and retail.

So if somebody comes and stays, say, at Claytor Lake in Pulaski, they're still going to come over here, so it's good for both of us to promote Claytor Lake. It gets people in Pulaski and it gets people here. It's good for us to promote Chateau Morrisette because people want to go to wineries, but Floyd has bed and breakfasts and they only have one hotel. So it's just good sense to say you can stay here and you can go over there too.

Same with Giles. Giles doesn't have anywhere to stay up there, but if you want to go to the river you go to Giles. Working with the region to promote each other just makes sense. So when we say New River Valley, fundamentally we're saying we understand we have the resources and we have the location to help everybody, so that's what we want to do.

Q How confident are you that the municipalities are going to be behind you and are going to give this money that was pulled earlier in the year?

A I am very confident for a number of reasons. First of all, they have always been strongly behind the tourism initiative. They understand the power of the tourism industry and what it can do for the area and how it can keep taxes down and prosperity up. And really they know it's the right thing to do for the area.

I don't think it was ever a matter of not believing in the tourism initiative. It was more about not liking the direction it was taking, not feeling confident that what needed to be done was being done. I believe now, with the plans that I've set forward, and the budget, and working with them the relationship that I have with the towns that I believe now they're confident its going to happen the way we envisioned it so I don't think they'll have a problem.

Q Why do they need to be two separate entities [the chamber and CVB]?

A There's two different focuses there. While the chamber's vision and tourism do complement each other, they really aren't the same vision, and let's face it, the history that's been there, I think it's best to sort of have a clean slate and to say 'OK, this just makes sense at this point,' and to say we don't want to have that happen again. We're not going to make a big deal out of it but if we're fully concentrating on what we need to do and they're fully concentrating on what they need to do, then working together is possible. But mixing it all up just confuses what needs to be done.

They really generally are [separate] unless it's such a small effort that's all you're doing is handing out brochures, or guiding people to the one place to go. But because of the vision of this program, it doesn't really make sense to mesh the two.

Q Are you disappointed you didn't get the director's job with the chamber, that they chose to hire outside the organization?

A Well, I was. To be truthful, I applied for it, I wanted it, but I'm much more excited about this now. I'm fully on board with this and I can't wait to be doing this stuff. It's what I'm good at and it's what I know. I think I'm just really going to enjoy it.

In this, it's almost exactly what I was doing at the chamber because I was doing the tourism, and on top of it all of the communications and the graphics and the marketing along with the other duties. But in this case I'll be doing it all for the tourism rather than splitting it.

Q What are the first things on your new organization's list to do?

A It's a list about this long [holds her arms wide apart].

We're really excited about a lot of things. Number one, which is sort of already in the works, is just this dynamite new Web site that we should have up and running within a few weeks of getting going.

Also, a new visitors guide, one that's more comprehensive. We're going to be doing the tear-off, tablet kinds of maps so that we can have those in all the lodgings and around town so people can give directions and actually draw them on the map. Those will probably be very immediate because those are already actually in the works.

We want to expand, we want to get with the group tours and get those buses to not just pass through. We have a lot passing through and a few that stop and do some things here and move on. We really have a long list that we're just all excited about doing, just jumping up and down and going 'oooh I can't wait to get this started.'

Q How important do you think it is for people locally to know what you're doing?

A I think it's major. I think people here want to be visible, we want to be seen and heard, want to take people's input because again, people will come to the visitors center and ask what is there to do, and they'll get brochures and ask a good place to eat and what have you, and we'll be happy to tell them that. So everybody really kind of needs to know where we're at and what we're talking about.

Our big slogan, what we're working with, is 'Virginia's Backyard.' Because we're going from the standpoint that you know how much fun it was when you were little to go in the back yard and go camping. Well if you go to Virginia's back yard, which is here, and go camping it's even better. The same thing, you might have had your kiddie pool out back to go swimming. Well, come here and do it in the Cascades.

We're saying we have a hometown feel, only better. If you come and visit us here, there's a myriad of things to do, but it's not big and commercialized, it's not Busch Gardens and it's not Disney World, it's just a really nice place to come and relax and enjoy yourself and feel free and loose and like a kid again. And it's good for people here to feel that way too, to say this is our back yard and look what we have.

Q Who is your tourism audience?

A Our biggest draw is more or less the East Coast. We're kind of centrally located for people who go down to Florida or up to New York, so we do get a lot of pass-through, or if you will, accidental traffic. We'd like to get them to stay longer, to notice us. Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, those kinds of people. As far as advertising goes, we generally advertise up and down the coastal areas, over in Ohio, Kentucky.

Believe it or not we get a lot of people from Texas just in our studies. I don't know why that is.

I think we mostly stay along the coast, because I don't think anybody's going to come from California to stay here for a week. If they're going to come that far, they're going to go to the beach or Williamsburg, which is fine, because it's still spending money in Virginia.

Q What else do you think it's important for people to know about your new endeavor?

A I believe the tourism program in the past three years has gotten a good foundation. I have been working at it three years, and I understand better than when I started what we need to do, what our strengths in this area are, which I think puts us in the ideal spot now for starting full force.

I think we can we see some real tangible success quickly. I feel very excited about that. I think maybe not all of the citizenry, but plenty have shown a great deal of interest in the whole idea and what it's about. I sincerely hope they will be in touch with us and talk to us and let us know what their thoughts and feelings are.

I've never been afraid of criticism or suggestions of critiques. I love to get advice. It doesn't mean I'm going to take any of it, but at least that way you know what people are thinking, and you try to take that into consideration in everything that you do.

There's a lot of self-proclaimed experts out there, and I'm not going to tell you I know more than any of them, but oftentimes they don't know the whole story; they only know what they've heard or what they believe. And if they feel strongly about it, coming in and talking to me, I would totally welcome that.

I hope critics of the program up to this point -- not that they were wrong -- but I hope they would be as vocal of our successes as they come along and support what we're doing as well.