Officials hope the Brits and a handful of folks ‘down under’ will save the day
In the wake of a slumping economy, Santa Monica is spending $200,000 on a European, advertising blitz to reinvigorate its tourism trade.
After a March study found that travelers from the United Kingdom far exceeded tourists from any other country, city officials are in the midst of launching one of Santa Monica’s most ambitious media campaigns. Almost all of the attention will be aimed at foreign tourists, especially in Great Britain.
“They tend to stay longer and spend more,” said Debbie Lee, communications manager for the Santa Monica Convention and Visitors Bureau. “And they walk much more.”
According to the city’s study, 62 percent of Santa Monica’s visitors are coming from international destinations, with the majority of that number coming from the U.K.
As strange as it may sound, city officials believe Santa Monica is a British paradise because it already has exceptional pubs and restaurants but none of that notoriously bad English weather.
4B4,“We believe they are already coming because of our community’s demographics,” Lee said. “We have a large British community here.”
But don’t expect to see high-gloss ads for Santa Monica while traveling abroad.
Santa Monica’s Convention and Visitor’s Bureau is arranging press junkets for foreign journalists to journey to Santa Monica in the hopes they will return home and write about the city’s plethora of shopping, sunny weather and stretches of warm sandy beaches.
They are scouting high profile, high circulation publications with travel sections, trade magazines with a focus on tourism and guide books.
“The hope is to bring as many journalists to Santa Monica as possible so they can see Santa Monica with their own eyes,” Lee said.
“(International tourists) tend to stay longer and spend more. And they walk much more.” — — DEBBIE LEE Santa Monica Convention and Visitors Bureau
Already the tactic is working at home.
Recent pieces about Santa Monica have already appeared in national news publications, and there may be at least two more journalists with the national press currently snooping around the city for travel pieces of their own.
“We’re constantly pitching the benefits of Santa Monica,” Lee said. “For the last year we have been focusing on the walk-ability of Santa Monica, especially with the completion of the transit mall.”
To make the media campaign a success – and affordable – Santa Monica has teamed up with Palm Spring’s tourism bureau and developed special business arrangements with airlines and travel companies to mitigate the extensive costs.
“We’re able to basically double the impact and coverage by partnering with
Palm Springs,” Lee said.
The city council gave $200,000 to the convention and tourism bureau in one-time funding for the media campaign and an additional $50,000 to help open the new visitor’s center in the Santa Monica Place Mall.
Santa Monica went through a tough budget process this year because of a steep drop-off in tax revenues from tourism-dependent industries. Both sales taxes – which are collected on everything from souvenirs and restaurant meals – and taxes collected on occupied hotel rooms have declined as much as 20 percent since last year.
And this summer is proving to be a mixed bag instead of the rebound officials were hoping for. While the summer months are typically the city’s busiest time for tourists, hotels are booking for much shorter time periods, officials said.
“Occupancy has increased but the length of stay as well as a shorter time frame in booking has offset that those gains,” Lee said. “Now they are booking two weeks or a week out from when the visitors arrive here.”
Lee said that is important because it gives hotels an unsure footing on how to price their rooms and prepare for the number of tourists to expect.
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Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 5, 2002. Read the original PDF.