Selling Long Beach: Pitch for Higher Profile Paying Off : City Goes Up Against Tourism Giants in Battle for Convention Dollars

It was a crisp evening along the shore of Lake Michigan as the Summer Mist shoved off.

Aboard the chartered 70-foot yacht were representatives of about 40 national organizations and a handful of dignitaries from Long Beach.

Conversation remained light as the guests munched on crab salad in pea pods and cucumber barquettes passed among them by a waitress bearing silver trays. Down below, a uniformed chef carved inside rounds of beef onto petite poppy-seed rolls. And gradually, warmed by Scotch and wine, the revelers eased forward toward the windy bow to enjoy a breathtaking view of Chicago at sunset.

“It’s beautiful” said one, staring off into the distance with a chilled glass of Perrier in her hand.

Only occasionally did talk turn to the much smaller city 2,000 miles away that had made the excursion possible. But underlying everything was that city’s presence. And beneath the veneer of luxury was a definite purpose. Come to Long Beach, the winds seemed to be saying. Come bring us your tired and hungry so that they may sleep in our hotels and eat in our restaurants.

“It’s a subtle, long-range sell,” explained Bill Miller, president of the tax-supported Long Beach Area Convention and Visitors Council, which, with the help of such other entities as Jet America Airlines and the Wrather Corp., had arranged this $3,000 evening afloat.

Their target: a few prime prospects among thousands of delegates attending the largest annual gathering of meeting and convention planners in America.

Their business: the selling of Long Beach. Specifically, the wooing of conventions and tourists to a city they say is ripe for a renaissance.

The story, of course, stretches further into the past than three years ago, when the visitors council began wining and dining potential customers. In the 1920s and ‘30s, council members say, Long Beach was a booming tourist mecca known as the “Coney Island of the West.” Then came World War II and the Navy. Gradually, the city’s image changed. And by the time the Navy began pulling out in the early 1960s, downtown Long Beach was in a major decline.

But city fathers kicked off a “rebirth” with the 1967 purchase of the Queen Mary. More than a decade later, the Spruce Goose emerged as a major attraction. And in 1978 came the opening of the Convention and Entertainment Center, which features 192,000 square feet of exhibition space.

Today, said Miller, about 2,200 first-class hotel rooms are available, or soon will be, within 400 yards of the Convention Center--more than twice the number of three years ago. And within two years, he said, the number of such rooms could reach 4,000.

Attracting tourists and conventioneers to those rooms, however, has been a challenge. For one thing, the city exists in the shadow of two major established convention and tourism sites--Los Angeles and Anaheim.

Suffers From Image Problem

For another, it has long suffered from an image problem. “Within California, Long Beach has a very negative image,” said Miller. “State meeting planners knew for years that downtown was not a good place to be.” Nationally, he said, the city was so little-known that when talking about Long Beach, “you may as well have been talking about Bisbee, Arizona.”

For years, city officials attempted to combat the problem with a series of private and public agencies established to promote Long Beach. They all disappeared, according to Carolyn Sutter, director of the city’s Tidelands Agency, which now oversees the effort, because they were run by “non-professionals” with little understanding of the convention and tourism business.

“They concentrated on advertising, but didn’t know the big picture,” Sutter said.

In 1982, the city created the Long Beach Area Convention and Visitors Council, an independent agency with 18 employees and an exclusive contract to book conventions and promote travel to Long Beach. About 70% of the council’s annual budget of $1.39 million comes from the city’s bed tax. The rest, said Miller, comes from dues paid by the 325 hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions that are members and from their contributions to specific joint ventures--such as the Summer Mist voyage--deemed mutually beneficial.

Council staff members say their work has already reaped dividends. From 1983--their first full year of operation--to 1984, they say, the number of annual overnight visitors in Long Beach increased by about 15%--from 976,000 to 1.12 million. And during the same period, the number of delegates attending conventions in Long Beach rose from 132,025 to 179,358--about 35.9%. (The International Assn. of Convention and Visitor Bureaus estimates that, nationwide, the typical conventioneer spends an average of $532 during his or her stay.)

Countywide, the 1984 increase in tourists and conventioneers--amounted to only about 3.2%, according to data compiled by the Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau.

“They’re all real professionals who know what they’re doing,” Sutter said of the Long Beach council staff. “We’re getting good value for our money.”

Added Miller: “We’re beginning to get into” a new league.

But changing a city’s profile on the national landscape is a long-term and exhaustive proposition. Miller and his staff--many of whom have worked in similar capacities for other cities--spend a great deal of time on the road.

Pitched to Travel Agents

Pattie Davidson, head of the council’s tourism department, said she and an assistant spend more than a week each month pitching Long Beach as a destination to travel agents from Salt Lake City to New Zealand. “When (would-be tourists) walk into their travel office and want to see brochures, we want Long Beach to be in there,” Davidson said.

Roger Gilmore, head of the convention sales department, attends 12 to 15 exhibitions a year in other states. It’s a tough job, he says. In an industry worth $30 billion annually, competition is fierce and Long Beach is a small fry.

The methods Gilmore uses range from seemingly silly hoopla to lavish entertainment.

His marketing strategy emphasizes four things about Long Beach: its proximity to the ocean, beautiful weather, fine hotels clustered near the Convention Center and central location in the vast Southern California complex of attractions ranging from Hollywood to Disneyland.

Sometimes a relatively short promotion has an almost immediate outcome. Recently, for instance, a council staff member spent a week in Baltimore vying for the 1987 convention of the Fraternal Order of Police. Included in the $4,000 Long Beach effort was a color slide show depicting sights of the city and a professional model dubbed “Miss California Fraternal Order of Police” prancing about in a bathing suit.

“We wanted to get their attention while we were talking to them,” explained Mack Widincamp, who was there on behalf of the council. In the end, however, Long Beach lost out to Mobile, Ala., which entertained the police officers by importing 1,000 pounds of shrimp for a gala feast.

At the recent Chicago gathering of the American Society of Association Executives, the Long Beach contingent, dressed in navy blue yachting blazers and captain’s hats, maintained a booth designed to look like the deck of the Queen Mary. They distributed literature about Long Beach, chatted with convention planners looking for new sites and drew from hundreds of business cards to give away a $200 teak deck chair.

Eventually, said Gilmore, those who left cards will be contacted. Because major meetings are usually planned several years in advance, he said, the results of the Chicago effort cannot be immediately gauged. (Of the $21,000 spent in Chicago by the Long Beach contingent, about $7,000 came from the council.)

Results Already Evident

Results from some previous efforts, however, are already evident. John Shaw, executive director of the 5,300-member American Society of Plumbing Engineers, recently booked his organization’s 1988 national convention in Long Beach. The city’s major competitors, he said, were Phoenix and Anaheim, but in the end he chose Long Beach because it had “ideal facilities for us and, quite frankly, because of what they did with the downtown renovation.”

It took some convincing, however. “Basically it was personal contact,” Shaw said of the approach that finally closed the deal. Even after Shaw was sold on Long Beach, though, he met some resistance from members of his board. “They had the impression of Long Beach the way it was 20 years ago,” he said, adding that at least one key decision-maker entertained “visions of having the sailors fight our people off the bar to get to the girls.”

So Shaw, who is based in Sherman Oaks, took his colleagues for a stroll around the city. “I showed them the walkway to the Convention Center and we had a drink at the Hyatt,” he said. “Once they saw it, they thought it was super.”

The result: an upcoming convention that, it is estimated, could bring $1.5 million into the city.

Sherry Cumpstone may be at the other end of that process. Director of communications for the 1,600-member American Academy of Medical Directors, based in Tampa, Fla., she is in a position to recommend sites for her organization’s 14 meetings held annually all over the country.

In Chicago for the meeting planners convention, she said she had never been to Long Beach and had always thought of it as “just a quiet little California coastal town.” But she happened by the Long Beach booth, found the people there a “very outgoing and friendly” group whose “enthusiasm got to me,” and ended up being invited to join the Summer Mist cruise.

Now, she said, she will urge her group to look into the city as a possible meeting site. “We already go to Palm Springs,” she said. “If Long Beach can show us they have everything to offer that Palm Springs does, we might consider coming.”

Presence Becoming Known

Promoters of other cities say they are just beginning to feel the presence of Long Beach as a potential competitor. “It really has increased dramatically in visibility in the last two to three years,” said Sandra Butler, director of sales for the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Added John Marks, president of the Phoenix and Valley of the Sun Convention and Visitors Bureau, which books conventions for the Phoenix/Scottsdale area: “Eighteen months ago the name of Long Beach just wouldn’t surface in a competitive sense. Now Long Beach is coming more into the picture--we’re seeing the name creep up.”

Although the two areas still do not compete on a “day-in, day-out” basis, he said, he can think of one or two convention bookings within the last six months that phoenix--even with its much larger 300,000-square-foot exhibition hall--may have lost to Long Beach.

“Long Beach is rapidly becoming an important destination,” said Marks, who supervises a staff of 37 with an annual budget of $3.5 million. “The city has obviously made a commitment.”

James Carter, who directs the East Coast division of the massive Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau, said he does not consider his city’s smaller neighbor to the south to be competition at all. Instead, he said, he sees it as a help in promoting the entire area.

“Long Beach is part of the total picture--an integral part of the whole L.A. convention site,” Carter said. “If somebody comes to Long Beach, they’ll go to all the L.A. attractions. We go head-to-head with Anaheim.”

And Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, spends $2.5 million annually promoting itself and attracts a hefty 30 million visitors a year. William F. Snyder, president of the Anaheim Visitor and Convention Bureau, said his city is not running scared as a result of Long Beach’s increasing visibility.

“The travel industry has an infinite market,” he said. “Our goal is to go out and create more business--to entice more people to travel to the West.”

Yet there is a certain amount of behind-the-scenes shuffling that goes on. In 1987, for instance, Anaheim will be the host to the massive meeting-planner’s convention held this year in Chicago. In an unusual move, the Long Beach Area Convention and Visitors Council has requested that one of the convention’s major evening events be held in Long Beach.

“We’d like to give our people a chance to see Long Beach,” said Bill Taylor, president of the society of association executives, which is holding the convention. “If Anaheim would be comfortable, we’d like to do it--otherwise I guess we won’t.”

Asked about the idea, however, Snyder’s response was swift. “I don’t like it,” he said.

He declined to say why not.

Rivals Are L.A., Anaheim

Long Beach promoters say they are still a long way from providing real competition to such major convention and tourist sites as Anaheim and Los Angeles. One problem, they say, is the relatively modest size of the city’s Convention Center.

Because the total exhibition space is so limited, Long Beach is going after only modest-sized conventions of about 2,500 delegates requiring but a small portion of the hotel rooms expected to be available in the city within the near future.

“I would like to see 100,000 more square feet of exhibition space within two years,” said Miller, adding that the city has commissioned a study, expected to be released soon, on the feasibility of just such an expansion.

Another problem, he said, is the modesty of the council’s budget. “It’s healthy for a city our size (380,000),” said Miller, “but for a convention site it’s small. We’re competing against bureaus with $2- to $3-million budgets.”

Tidelands director Sutter, who attended the Chicago convention as a guest of the visitors council, said she is not yet convinced of the necessity for a larger convention center.

And regarding the council’s budget, which she administers, she said, “We’re doing well, but we could always do better.” Because the 60% portion of the city’s 7% bed tax that does not go to the visitors council is already committed elsewhere, she said, she does not expect an immediate increase in the council’s share.

And so continues what some council staff members describe as an uphill battle. At the convention in Chicago, the Long Beach booth and a booth next to it sponsored by the Queen Mary were only two out of nearly 600. Upstairs at the Los Angeles booth, celebrity health promoter Richard Simmons, dancing to the beat of “I Love L.A.,” drew crowds by lifting gasping middle-aged women from the Midwest over his shoulders as a comrade gleefully snapped souvenir pictures.

San Diego Sand Castle

Nearby, in San Diego territory, a large contingent of workers carefully fashioned 12,000 pounds of beach sand into an enormous sand castle featuring various sites in their city.

And over Puerto Rico way, in one of the most popular booths on the floor, beautiful women doled out tickets good for free samples of Puerto Rican rum.

In Long Beach country, things were quieter. A handful of attendants took turns serving coffee and cookies, distributing visitors’ guides, exchanging business cards and earnestly chatting about their city.

Not everyone stopped by.

One floor up, Karen L. Wallerstein, executive director of continuing professional education at the Institute for Research & Development in Oak Park, Ill., was entering the exhibit hall fresh from a trip to San Francisco, one of several cities around the country where her firm holds seminars.

“We were talking about going south,” she said, referring to Southern California. But she had never been to Long Beach and, indeed, wasn’t even sure where it was. “It’s in California, isn’t it?” she asked. “I’m sure I’ve heard of it, but I can’t recall just when.”

And not far away, Bob Davenport, executive director of the Wisconsin Society of Professional Engineers, based in Madison, was reminiscing about a one-day excursion he once took to the Queen Mary. Of Long Beach, he said: “My image isn’t great and it isn’t terrible. I guess it’s just sort of nothing.”

Even aboard the Summer Mist, loaded as it was with special would-be customers, competitors weren’t far behind. Pulling out of the harbor, Miller noticed a similarly laden yacht not 100 yards away preparing to move in the same direction.

“There’s Baltimore,” he said, staring warily over the side.