Orange County, once seen as a tourism step-child of Los Angeles, is poised to move into the big time among tourist destinations when the $5.4 billion remake of Anaheim and the Disneyland Resort is complete at year’s end.
Besides the Disney name, the county has a Tourism Council touting OC as a destination for visitors. Selling points include first-class beaches,Newport Beach recently ranked No. 5 among the nation’s urban beaches by the Surfrider Foundation.
Then there are tourism directors at area retail centers luring the international traveler, and OC has a red-hot economy that has propelled it to the No. 7 spot on Forbes magazine’s list of best places to do business in the U.S.
Another sign of optimism is that tourism overall is growing by leaps and bounds. Market research firm D.K. Shifflet & Associates projected leisure travel within California to grow by as much as 12% this year.
But would those tourists come here for anything besides Disneyland and the beaches? Exactly how does OC stack up against other markets like Los Angeles, San Diego or Orange County, Fla., home to Orlando and a host of Disney and Universal theme parks?
Almost 38 million people visited Orange County in 1999. They spent $5.9 billion, a 4.3% increase from 1998. The Anaheim/Orange County Visitor and Convention Bureau has a $7.3 million budget for the coming fiscal year that’s awaiting city approval.
But try as tourism officials might to turn OC into a stand-alone destination, many still see it as an extension of Los Angeles. And, even at that, it’s all Disneyland.
“It’s really a Disney product,” said Terry Korf, owner of Path Ways Travel in Westminster, Colo., one of the Denver area’s largest travel agencies. “We have a lot of clients who know LA is huge and they can’t really distinguish one area from another.”
That sentiment is sometimes echoed locally, too.
“It will always be Disneyland and the beach,” said Mark Kallenberger, a Costa Mesa hospitality consultant.
But Diane Baker, chief executive officer of the Huntington Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau and co-chair of the Orange County Tourism Council, has a different take.
“That’s why (California) ranks so low in tourism spending,” she said. “The Legislature believes people will always come.”
And with states like Colorado increasing their spending to lure tourists, the competition will only get tougher. California’s tourism promotion budget,the 15th largest in the nation,is $13.2 million. In Southern California, LA spends about $30 million and San Diego spends $15.2 million, while Orlando has a $16.4 million war chest.
Baker said Orange County’s strength is in the variety of attractions that people want to see.
And Bill Ross, VP of public affairs for the Disneyland Resort and Baker’s co-chair on the Tourism Council, pointed to partnerships between convention business and restaurants, the unified focus on cultural events like “Forbidden City” at the Bowers Museum and the efforts to market the county as a single destination as strengths for OC.
“It’s pulling the county together,” he said.
Kallenberger gave high marks to the county for the convenience of John Wayne Airport and the surrounding hotels, though Korf said one reason they don’t fly more people here from Denver is the high fares from that market.
But Baker said the county’s image and promotion efforts are a weakness that could use some help from the business community.
“Working together, I think Orange County can be the destination (if we) give (tourists) enough to do in an acceptable driving distance,” she said.
But to become a singular destination of choice, OC still has its work cut out for it.
Only about half, or 17.5 million, of the total visitors to OC last year spent at least one night here. LA had 23.5 million in overnight visitors and San Diego attracted 14.7 million overnight visitors. But Orlando only outdrew OC by 1 million people.
In visitor spending, only San Diego falls below OC at $4.8 billion. LA took in $11.9 billion from tourists and Orlando emptied tourist pockets to the tune of $17.2 billion,and that’s a 1998 figure, the most recent available.
In the number of total hotel rooms, Orange County still lags. OC’s total room count could arguably increase by about 10,000 in the next couple of years, given the influx of tourists expected to flock to the new California Adventure. That would still leave Orange County just shy of 60,000 rooms. That exceeds San Diego’s current count of about 45,000. But LA has 93,000 and Orlando is hovering around the 100,000 mark.
And all of those markets are building hotels, too. Orlando expects its room count to reach 122,600 by 2003.
Room rates in Orlando are lower than any of the markets in Southern California,average last year was $85,but occupancy for the year was 73%, not much higher than the 71% achieved by hotels here during major construction, though they have almost double the number of rooms to fill. Meanwhile, through March of this year, San Diego had an average rate of $131 and occupancy of 74.4%, while LA took in an average of $121 per night and reached 75% occupancy.
Hotel taxes, which can be a killer in any market, are comparable in all four markets, though Anaheim has the highest bed tax at 15%, compared to San Diego’s 10.5%.
Parks Competitive in Price
While locals often carp when the fees at area amusement parks are raised, Southern California is a bargain compared to Orlando. Knott’s has the best one-day adult admission at $38, though Six Flags in Valencia has the best one-day pass for children at $20. Disneyland’s current one-day prices of $41 for adults and $31 for children is the same as Universal Studios, according to figures from trade publication Amusement Business.
In Orlando, where more parks mean more ferocious competition, this year’s prices are $46 for adults and $37 for children for one-day admittance across the board.
But statistics don’t tell the whole tale of tourism, where every city or region has to be aware of the trends in leisure travel to keep the tourist dollars flowing.
“Reinventing the destination is critical,” said Peter Yesawich, a hospitality consultant based in Orlando. “Within each three-year cycle, there’s a repeat factor of 70%, so you need new attractions (to maintain visitors).”
Yesawich’s firm publishes an annual survey of travel habits and preferences of Americans. He said the most important factor in determining a destination is perceived safety,and that’s an area where both Orange counties get good marks.
Reinventing the Destination
Secondly, the survey shows that seven out of 10 Americans want to go someplace they’ve never been before.
“That’s where Orlando has a leg up,” he said. “They reinvent themselves every couple of years.”
Yesawich said 43% of Americans want to visit theme parks when they travel. Indeed, total attendance at the country’s amusement parks was 309 million last year, generating $9.1 billion in revenue, according to Amusement Business. And seven of the top 10 parks in 1999 attendance are in Orlando, though the trade publication ranked Disneyland No. 2 with 12.7 million visitors and Universal Studios Hollywood No. 7 with 5.1 million.
The Orlando advantage in theme park numbers will narrow, however, if California Adventure draws as expected and Disney later builds a third gate in Anaheim.
Last week it was reported that the Walt Disney Co. is now talking to the city of Anaheim about an 80-acre park near Disneyland. While resort officials downplayed the talks, it has long been anticipated that Disney would consider a third gate once California Adventure was complete.
Cedar Fair, parent company of Knott’s Berry Farm, can help close the gap, too. Knott’s Berry Farm ranked No. 11 last year with 3.6 million visitors, and the new Soak City parks in Buena Park and San Diego will bolster that company’s visibility here.
Meanwhile Wild Rivers in Irvine has expressed some concern about the competition in Buena Park and bolstered its own marketing efforts with new promotions for the coming season.
Legoland, which opened in Carlsbad last year, has given a boost to the San Diego market with its first-year attendance of 1.5 million and added to the Sea World-Lion Country Safari-San Diego Zoo routine followed by many visitors. (Sea World tied at No. 11 with Knott’s on the Amusement Business list of the top 50 parks, ranked by attendance.)
LA, of course, has Universal Studios, which this year overhauled its backlot tram tour, expanded its companion Citywalk, and opened Terminator 2 3-D to boost its attendance.
Beaches Rank High
One area where OC shines is beaches. Yesawich said about half of American travelers want to spend time at the beach and Southern California beaches had 5.7 million visitors last year, more people than any other state park in California.
Korf, the Denver-area travel agency owner, said, “When clients are interested in beaches, we send them to Orange County. We think those are the best (beaches).”
Charles Ahlers, president of the Anaheim/Orange County Visitor & Convention Bureau, calls beaches “our crown jewel,” citing that as one reason the area’s tourism officials got together last year to help sponsor the statewide Coastal Cleanup day for which the tourism groups won an award for best community service program. Officials thought the effort would illustrate their recognition of the important role the beaches play to the tourism industry here.
“Not many other tourism groups got involved in this in California,” Ahlers said.
“(We think) it sends out a very strong message to our targeted audience that our industry thinks green,an important component in selling our destination as a whole.”
watching, all of which are easily accessible to Orlando.
An area where OC and all of Southern California is often found lacking is transportation.
One exception is San Diego’s trolley, which links Tijuana with downtown and Qualcomm Stadium. The red train is easy to use, reasonably priced and popular with visitors and locals alike, especially when the San Diego Chargers football team is in town. And San Diego’s Gaslamp District adjacent to the convention, Horton Plaza and trolley stops, is creating what some industry pros call “formidable competition” for the rest of Southern California.
Orange County had its own foray into a tourist shuttle,the Orange County Connection,but it was discontinued earlier this year for financial reasons. Still, trolleys link Anaheim hotels with the Convention Center and Disneyland and there are plans to expand the routes to include Edison Field and the Arrowhead Pond. Earlier this month, the local tourism officials unveiled plans to launch a similar, connecting service in early June (see related story page 36). But this is still the land of the car, and LA economist Jack Kyser said that’s one thing that needs to change.
“One thing we have to let people know is that there’s rail transportation in Southern California,” he said.
But despite its relatively small size,Orange County is the smallest of the five-county area that makes up the Southern California basin,and lack of a unified identity, there’s one thing almost certain in OC’s future: the attraction of Disney will bring the tourists in.
“Disneyland is the major attraction in Southern California. It’s what people come (here) for,” Kallenberger said.
And with the launch of California Adventure near at hand, that attraction will strengthen.
“If you’re in the Midwest and looking to go to a Disney park, they used to opt for Florida,but now (with California Adventure) it becomes a critical mass (here) for attracting people,” Kyser said. n
