In This TAG, Orange County Is ‘It’ : Area Officials Pursue Travel Agents to Boost Tourism

It took just two hours Friday morning for Cindy R. Novotny to give away 300 beach balls, 400 chocolate chip cookies and--oh, yes--800 brochures on the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel.

In return, she walked away from her tiny booth at the Anaheim Convention Center with a stack of business cards about two inches thick.

But Novotny, national sales manager at the 494-room hotel in Costa Mesa, thinks that she got the better end of the deal. The business cards belong to some of the 800 travel agents from 50 states and eight foreign nations who are visiting Anaheim this weekend. The travel agents--nearly 75% of whom are visiting here for the first time--are getting a VIP tour of Anaheim in the hopes that they’ll book plenty of tours to the Anaheim area once they return home.

This marks the 14th consecutive year that the city has hosted the event called TAG Days--an acronym for “Travel Agents Get Acquainted.” More than acquainted, they get wined, dined and pampered like foreign dignitaries. After all, at stake is potentially tens of millions of dollars worth of future tourism business.

Times of Their Lives

With stakes that high, 84 local attractions and businesses--ranging from Disneyland to the Anaheim Hilton--are spending a combined $1.5 million to show these travel agents the times of their lives, according to Bill Snyder, president of the Anaheim Area Visitor & Convention Bureau.

But despite the recent tourism boom in Orange County, travel industry executives say that it is not always an easy sales job. “Everyone seems to know about Newport Beach, but no one knows Costa Mesa,” said the Westin’s Novotny. So she spent the day explaining to travel agents why her hotel--which is a long haul from Disneyland and the beaches--is still a good place to book tourists. She said that the hotel’s greatest draw is the shopping and cultural activities in the South Coast Plaza area.

Making pitches along with Novotny were representatives from 40 other hotels and motels, 16 airlines, a handful of rental car services and sales people from virtually every major tourist attraction within 100 miles of Anaheim.

‘Learn a Little Bit’

“The whole idea is that they’ll learn a little bit more about this area,” said Snyder. “Hopefully, they’ll use the information not just for the next few months but over the next several years,”

Exhibitors were especially eager to reach such people as Carla Molebash, a travel agent from La Grande, Ore., who has been an agent just six weeks. After walking away with a stack of information courtesy of the 1,600-room Anaheim Hilton--one of the largest hotels in Southern California--Molebash confided: “I didn’t even realize there was a Hilton here.”

What Molebash quickly did realize is that the other visiting travel agents make far better travel information sources than the exhibitors. “It’s the agents who really know what’s going on,” she said.

She’ll have plenty of time over the next few days to chat with her compatriots while visiting the Anaheim Hilton, the Anaheim Marriott, the Disneyland Hotel, Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm.

Huge Return on Investment

It cost Knott’s Berry Farm the equivalent of nearly $9,000 in entrance fees to let in more than 700 travel agents for free on Friday afternoon. But Phyllis Mitchell, a Knott’s sales manager, said that the investment reaps huge returns. “People all know the name Knott’s, but if they haven’t been here they really don’t know what we’re all about.”

Few agents, however, have to visit Disneyland to know what the Magic Kingdom is all about. But most were still planning to go on a bus trek there this afternoon.