San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau Reports Out
By San Diego Daily Transcript, July 23, 2004
It’s summertime in San Diego and we are in the midst of our peak tourism season.
You might wonder how many tourists visit San Diego in the summer months. Last year, we welcomed 9.3 million visitors to our region from June through August. Some of those visitors were here for a day trip, half of them spent the night in the homes of family and friends, and the rest booked rooms in our area hotels and motels.
Tourism in San Diego is definitely booming this summer, thanks to increased consumer confidence, a healthy national economy, and the efforts of your San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau to aggressively promote leisure travel and convention and meetings business to our region.
We all recognize the fact that San Diego is “Heaven on Earth” --as it was marketed back in the turn of the 20th century. However, in this highly competitive day and age, we simply cannot rest on our laurels and become complacent about selling the San Diego “product.”
Competition for the leisure traveler and convention dollar is fierce. Cities such as Las Vegas and Orlando have unlimited funds to seduce delegates and leisure travelers to their destinations (with budgets of $168 million and $38 million, respectively.)
With the recent budget cuts imposed on the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau of some $2.7 million dollars (down to $12.5 million), we drop to 15th place among bureaus nationally. What does this mean? We will have to fight a fierce battle to maintain our market share in the face of cities that have mega-bucks to launch expensive ad campaigns and employ large sales and marketing staffs to lure leisure travelers and convention delegates to their destinations.
To those of you not directly involved in the business of tourism, you may not fully understand the role your San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau (ConVis) plays in utilizing a $12.5 million budget to stimulate the more than $5 billion dollars in visitor industry spending that pours into our local economy annually.
Approximately 89 percent of our visitors are leisure travelers, so a great part of our sales efforts go into advertising to this market. These travelers come in all demographics and with various vacation requirements, so we try to cover all the bases in our advertising. Some of these “niche” markets within the national leisure travel market include families traveling with children, cultural tourists, eco-tourists, the Gen-X market, the Baby Boomer market and the Senior market. We also reach out to numerous specialty groups, from golfers and cruise ship travelers to spa enthusiasts, to name just a few.
San Diego is unique in having an incredible palette of activities and attractions to satisfy just about any traveler’s taste. This summer brings even more exciting options for vacationers and meeting delegates to choose from during their visit.
The opening of the Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum, for example, has generated heightened interest in both the leisure travel and meetings markets. According to Midway officials, more than 400 meeting planners have contacted Midway staff since January about holding an event on the aircraft carrier--and 200 meetings and events are already on the books! They also reported that their first month visitor attendance figures tripled their most optimistic projections!
The 32-floor luxurious Omni Hotel, strategically located next to our new PETCO Park, opened a few months ago to add yet another first-class hotel property to San Diego’s downtown. Meeting planners across the country are exploring the possibility of holding their special events in several exciting venues in our new ballpark. Journey to Atlantis, SeaWorld's largest new attraction in its 40-year history, is definitely attracting plenty of visitors anxious to experience “what’s new” in our region. In a similar way, the Dino Mountain exhibit at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the exciting new rides at LEGOLAND will also help keep the San Diego product fresh and add to the “buzz” about the exciting options available to the visitor during their stay.
Since most of our advertising is directed to out-of-town markets, some of you may not be familiar with our San Diego Brand, which we developed in 1997 to convey our message to the travel consumer. Our brand positions (“brands”) the region as a place where visitors can enjoy the best of the Southern California lifestyle and escape the pressures of everyday life. We use warm colors, text and photos that speak to a variety of audiences, from couples to families to friends of all ages. Each of our ads captures a part of the San Diego lifestyle and unique Southern California experiences found only here. (To catch a glimpse of the San Diego Brand, please visit our website at www.sandiego.org).
With all these marketing goals and opportunities in mind, I’d like to share with you some figures highlighting your Bureau’s performance in fiscal year 2004.
Our marketing division, with an advertising budget of $3.8 million, reached 45 markets (14 more than in FY’03) with a staggering 541 million advertising impressions. Our staff solicited visits from media from around the world to write about or film the San Diego region, generating $9.3 million in unpaid publicity for our destination in the form of print, radio and television coverage. Another $7.5 million in free San Diego advertising was generated through marketing promotional partnerships with major corporations. I think you will agree this is a very significant return on a $3.8 million investment.
And there’s more. A happy visitor is a repeat visitor and ConVis takes pride in providing exceptional service to both the leisure traveler and convention delegate. Our team at the International Visitor Information Center (which recently moved from Horton Plaza to the waterfront at Harbor Drive and Broadway) and our La Jolla Visitor Center personally assisted 118,000 walk-in visitors and answered 28,000 telephone calls from potential visitors during the past fiscal year.
Our award-winning website, www.sandiego.org, hit an all-time high of 2.9 million sessions in FY ’04 as internet users from around the world logged onto our popular site for detailed information on the region.
Our convention services team maintained a “very satisfied” or “extremely satisfied” rating from over 95% of the convention clients they serviced this past year. In fact, the San Diego ConVis Bureau just received the acclaimed 2004 Gold Service ELITE award from Meetings & Conventions magazine, placing it among the top five bureaus in the nation for exceptional service. That prestigious award followed on the heels of the equally impressive Pinnacle award, which was bestowed on our bureau for the eleventh year in a row by the readers of Successful Meetings magazine, again for our outstanding convention services.
Our team of hotel meeting sales managers, located not only in San Diego but also in our target markets of Chicago; Washington, DC; New York; Dallas and Sacramento used their negotiating skills to book 1,312 meetings that used 644,000 hotel room nights in San Diego in FY 2004. These are in addition to the 685,000 room nights generated by the Bureau’s Citywide Convention Sales team for 60 conventions held in the San Diego Convention Center this past fiscal year.
The proof of ConVis’ successful efforts continues to be reflected in the overall health of San Diego’s visitor industry. We just closed the books on our Visitor Industry indicators for FY’04 (June 30), and I am happy to report there were healthy increases in all categories across the board.
Overnight visitors increased +2.3% compared to FY’03 and visitor spending climbed a healthy +4.2%. Averaging in at 71.2%, our hotel occupancy rate rose a hefty +7% compared to last year and our average daily hotel rate of $110.69 indicates an increase of +2.6%. Attendance at our area attractions and at museums also rose accordingly (1.1% and 2.2% respectively), as did airport arrivals (7.2 million), bringing 5.8% more passengers through the turnstiles at Lindbergh Field this year than last.
With summer 2004 in full swing, your San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau encourages you to explore and enjoy all the wonderful amenities San Diego has to offer to its visitors and residents alike! We are so fortunate to live in a community that others pay dearly to experience. Now get out there and be a tourist in your own backyard!
