Adding an attraction to a very attractive place

In a typical peak season, an average of over 100 people a day take the Block Island Bicycle Tour, which helped to increase Block Island Express ferry ridership to record levels during the pre-COVID era. The success of the tour also had an andecdotal impact on various bike rental businesses on the island, and helped AB&C develop a long-lasting marketing relationship with the Block Island Tourism Council, for whom we’ve subsequently executed several advertising campaigns.

Block Island is a popular vacation destination 12 miles off the Rhode Island coast. It offers gorgeous views, pleasant beaches, and good restaurants, and is small enough that some visitors elect to rent bikes and pedal around the island. Working for Block Island Express, the ferry operation that brings visitors from New England to Block Island, we saw a way to increase interest in cycling the island – and to give prospective visitors an added reason to make an initial or return visit.

We developed a 12-stop self-guided Block Island Bicycle Tour. Each stop is marked with signposts that feature QR codes in the center. When engaged via cell phone, these codes take visitors to short videos about that specific location. In cooperation with production partners Content, we developed the videos, created the web pages to house them, created promotional advertising, and even translated the tour into a wallet-sized paper foldout for those who didn’t want to take their cell phones out of their pockets

In a typical peak season, an average of over 100 people a day take the Block Island Bicycle Tour, which helped to increase Block Island Express ferry ridership to record levels during the pre-COVID era. The success of the tour also had an andecdotal impact on various bike rental businesses on the island, and helped AB&C develop a long-lasting marketing relationship with the Block Island Tourism Council, for whom we’ve subsequently executed several advertising campaigns.