Visitors Bureaus Have Grown With Tourism Industry
When the Anaheim/Orange County Visitor & Convention Bureau was formed in 1961, it conducted business from a farmhouse surrounded by orange groves and its members simply hoped to make Anaheim a year-round destination.
Forty years later, the bureau is housed on that same piece of land,in the newly expanded Anaheim Convention Center that is the largest on the West Coast and one of the largest in the country.
The bureau was formed before there even was a Convention Center, but its employees tried to keep the city’s fledgling hotels full with meetings during the off-seasons. This year, meetings and conventions are expected to bring 1.3 million people to OC.
Business and leisure travelers to Orange County totaled 40 million last year, and the $6 billion they generated in peripheral spending makes them a force in the county’s economy.
For years, the Anaheim bureau was the only game in town, but as tourism became an increasingly important industry in the county, other bureaus sprang up and today Anaheim is one of six such entities in the county.
But visitor bureaus aren’t just for visitors. The business they bring in,particularly for meetings and conventions,puts money in city coffers and helps bring name recognition to the area. Anaheim alone is projected to reap at least $4.5 million in new annual bed tax revenue from Disneyland’s expansion,money that city officials are quick to point out can be used to the benefit of all residents.
And some bureaus are active as well in efforts to attract new business to their cities.
“Most bureaus work closely with economic development departments and help with relocation efforts,” said Diane Baker, president and chief executive of the Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau. “The bureaus bring (people) in and the chambers take care of them when they’re here. It’s all tied together.”
In Newport Beach, director of travel industry sales Bridget Lindquist said the city’s marine industry is one that benefits from the bureau’s work on the yearly Newport-to-Ensenada yacht race. Though that race runs just one weekend out of the year, Lindquist said the marine industry gets a lot of business from participants in the months leading up to the race,and that translates into tax dollars for the city.
In Laguna Beach, the bureau is working to institute a self-assessment tax on tourist-serving businesses to benefit that city’s arts community.
“Many unique programs wouldn’t happen without tourist dollars,” said Kathleen Spalione, director of the Laguna Beach Visitors Bureau.
Helping the bureaus promote OC as a destination for the past three years was a county grant of $750,000 per year that was shared by the six major visitor bureaus. That grant expires at the close of the fiscal year on June 30.
Because of the funding, said Charles Ahlers, president of the Anaheim bureau, the county’s tourism industry was able to leverage its marketing partners for more money to generate media buys in San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento and even Utah. The aim of the media campaign was to sell the region rather than specific attractions.
Steve Bone, president of the Robert Mayer Corp., Newport Beach, who heads the council’s legislative committee, is spearheading the efforts to get the funding renewed later this year.
“It is most necessary for the county to support tourism, now more than ever,” Bone said. He said the fact that Anaheim has a new park and convention center should not mean the supervisors back off any support.
“The energy blackouts have been a plague upon the market, and the PR (about it) from other areas will hurt us.”
Bone said that, of necessity, most bureaus concentrate on the meeting planner market.
“There’s very little on an individual basis, because it’s so expensive to go after individual tourism,that’s why it’s so necessary that the county help us with those dollars,” he said.
Bob Tunstall, executive assistant to County Supervisor Chair Cynthia Coad, said the current proposal is to lower the co-op dollars to about $400,000 per year, but the final figure won’t be determined until sometime next month as part of the total county budget proposal.
“The direction is to cut the funding,” he said. “But we’re still working on it. We’ve had several hundred letters (from the tourism community) about it.”
“Tourism is sometimes overlooked,” Spalione said, “but if energy and water quality issues don’t get resolved, (its importance to the county) may show up.” n
