By Stefan Yablonski
The award-winning website www.DiscoverUpstateNY.com (DUNY) is getting some improvements.
The “go-to site” promotes a diverse variety of tourism opportunities for enthusiasts both near and far.
The site presents more than 2,900 tourism attractions, a robust event calendar, blog posts and interactive map of all nine tourism regions of Upstate New York, west of the Hudson River.
It was recognized at the New York State Tourism Industry Association awards ceremony in May 2021. It received the Award of Excellence in Overall Tourism Marketing by a Private Sector Entity.
The website also features hundreds of restaurants, hotels, tourism attractions and historical sites.
“DUNY has been around like eight years. It started as a much smaller project, featuring the towns along Lake Ontario and grew by demand to include all nine tourism regions west of the Hudson River including 56+ featured cities and towns throughout the state” said David Granoff, of Oswego, the chief editor, administrator and visionary of DUNY. “At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the site received nearly two million views. Our social media platforms exploded, including more than 26,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook.”
Things have definitely picked up recently, he said.
“We actually just launched a new website [same website address] and are building up our stats — probably going to surpass the old levels by the end of the summer we are still in the creation form. We will have a new way of browsing for attractions. It will be much easier to find things across New York state,” he said.
They have about 40,000 and 80,000 views plus a month, depending on the time of the year.
“Summer is the big vacation time. But we also feature heavily all four seasons.”
“I also feature the marine sanctuary — I am on the board of directors of the Lake Ontario Marine Sanctuary. My role is tourism as an advisory community member,” he continued. “The feature on our website about the marine sanctuary outlines all the major cities, places to go camping, places to eat, places to stay all the way from Clayton down to Pulaski and Oswego and west to Fair Haven and Sodus to just before you get to Rochester. We have close to 4,000 attractions on the site, about 110 featured cities. We have an interactive mapping system. You can search for anything you want by city, region or attraction.”
He has a staff of about five or six. “Many of the people have been with me for a pretty long time.,” he said. “We have an ad manager from Long Island, a technical designer from KCNY Design, Syracuse, creative writers up in the Adirondacks and across the state and of course me.”
Granoff is now a full member partner of the New York State Tourism Association and a tourism ambassador in the state. He is “a very active Rotarian” and a multiple times president. He will be president again this fall of the Oswego Rotary Club. His work has covered several key areas in Central and Upstate New York.
