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Visit Cornwall continue to advertise Siblyback Lake Watersports Centre a month after it was closed!

Searching today on Google for "Siblyback Lake" and one of the prominent pages that appeared in the results was on the visitcornwall.com website. Strangely a month after the watersports centre was closed, they continued to advertise it on their site. This is likely to lead to confusion and possible disappointment among visitors to Cornwall, the very people their organisation is supposed to help!


What is particularly interesting about this is that the Chairman and non-Executive Director of South West Lakes Limited Malcolm Bell is also Chief Executive of Visit Cornwall. South West Lakes Limited is the subsidiary trading company that previously ran the Siblyback watersports business at the lake on behalf of South West Lakes Trust.


So VisitCornwall can't really argue that they didn't know about the closure!



Malcolm Bell is also a Trustee of the Wheal Martyn Trust Limited which runs the china clay museum just outside St Austell.

Following an email to Mr Bell by the publisher of this blog, the erroneous VisitCornwall.com website was promptly updated on the 25th March 2019 to reflect the fact that the Siblyback Lake Outdoor and Active Centre is closed for the 2019 season.

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