Drop In, Stay Awhile : With Its Traditional Industries in Decline, San Pedro Chases the Tourist Dollar

When Karl Sanger attended a travel industry trade show in Las Vegas in June, he set up shop in the booth maintained by the Long Beach Visitors and Convention Bureau, the people who try to attract tourists to Long Beach.

But Sanger wasn’t promoting Long Beach.

He was promoting San Pedro.

As director of sales for the newly built Compri Hotel at the Cabrillo Marina, Sanger aimed to persuade tour operators that San Pedro would make a fine base for visitors who want to explore Southern California. And he had some success; a British travel agent contracted for 3,600 room nights at the 226-room Compri, which is set to open Tuesday.

Day Trips From Hotel

The British travelers will spend seven nights at the Compri. From there, they will take day trips to Disneyland, Universal Studios and other tourist hot spots. Said Sanger: “(The tour operator) has been putting his people in Anaheim or he’s been putting his people in downtown Los Angeles, and now he’s going to put them here.”

Sanger’s experience in Las Vegas illustrates two truths about San Pedro’s fledgling tourism trade. First is that the business is in its infancy--so new that Sanger was compelled to ally himself with nearby Long Beach, which boasts such nationally known attractions as the Spruce Goose and Queen Mary.

But second--and, San Pedro business leaders say, more important--is the potential for San Pedro to become a tourist destination, rather than a quick stopping point.

European Ethnic Flavor

With a string of its own waterfront attractions--Ports O’Call Village, the World Cruise Center at the Port of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Maritime Museum and Cabrillo Marine Museum, among others--plus a European ethnic flavor that is rare in other Southern California communities, San Pedro already attracts hundreds of thousands of day-trippers each year. Many know San Pedro as the point of embarkation for Catalina Island, Mexico and Alaska, among other destinations.

And with the new Compri, as well as a 232-room Sheraton Hotel under construction downtown and plans for a cruise center hotel under consideration by port officials, San Pedro will have plenty of room to house those visitors.

“Tourism is a very viable (economic) alternative which has not been tapped in San Pedro,” said Leron Gubler, executive director of the San Pedro Peninsula Chamber of Commerce.

“The potential is here,” Gubler said. “We have easy freeway access, we’re on the water, we’re the port, we have excellent restaurants. . . . In the past, we’ve had people coming down for a day to go to Catalina or Ports O’Call Village, but we’ve got to get them to stay.”

Said John Clayton, who specializes in public relations for the tourism industry and serves on the newly established San Pedro Tourism Council:

“I think coming to San Pedro offers a whole different experience. . . . How wonderful to come down here instead of the smoggy interiors of Anaheim and some of these other places. How wonderful to be in all this history and atmosphere and still be freeway-close, and to be right on the water. . . . I think if it’s properly publicized it has enormous potential.”

There are no comprehensive statistics that document how many people visit San Pedro each year, how many stay overnight or how many might elect to stay in San Pedro instead of elsewhere. The Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau lumps San Pedro in with the rest of the greater Los Angeles area, which hosted an estimated 48.3 million overnight visitors in 1988.

However:

Ports O’Call Village attracts more than 1.1 million visitors each year, according to its merchants association, and the parking lot there is so jammed on weekends that the merchants recently voted to recommend that the village cut back on advertising in order to avoid frustrating visitors who can’t find a place to park.

More than 250,000 cruise ship passengers travel through the port’s World Cruise Center annually. A port official estimated that 40% of those passengers live 50 or more miles from Los Angeles and would provide a primary target for San Pedro’s hotel industry. An additional 300,000 passengers, most from the Los Angeles area, travel between San Pedro and Catalina Island each year.

The Los Angeles Maritime Museum received 103,000 visitors last year, at least half of whom live beyond Los Angeles and its surrounding areas, according to museum Director William Lee. “Certainly during the summertime we get an awful lot of out-of-town visitors,” Lee said. “We get a lot of people who come down to board the ships or who are stopping over.”

San Pedro business people would like to capitalize on these numbers.

Key to Economic Future

The Chamber of Commerce sees tourism as the key to the economic future of San Pedro, not only because it will be good for existing businesses but, Gubler says, because it will create jobs.

With San Pedro’s traditional industries--shipbuilding and canning--on the decline, the community has lost more than 5,000 jobs in the 1980s. Gubler says tourism is a good way to replace them, although not everyone in San Pedro agrees.

“There are a lot of new hotels going up and everybody is trumpeting growth and tourism,” said Greg Smith, a community leader. “I’m not convinced that the economic future of San Pedro should be as tied to tourism as to other things, like high-tech. . . . Tourism tends to be low-paying jobs, it’s not a good economic base. It’s OK for a few people to operate cruise ships and run restaurants, but in terms of the grunt work, it’s not a good job.”

Gubler concedes that the jobs created by tourism--for hotel workers and waiters, for example--do not pay nearly as well as the shipbuilding and canning positions that were lost.

Still, he insists, tourism “is essential if San Pedro is to remain alive and vital. If we do not do this, San Pedro will become little more than a bedroom community.”

In an effort to spur the tourism trade, and to prepare for the coming hotel boom, the chamber brought together about two dozen San Pedro business people and created the tourism council in January.

Can’t Rely on L.A. Bureau

Gubler says San Pedro can no longer afford to rely on the Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau, which he said has not adequately promoted San Pedro. The bureau’s president, Bill Miller, acknowledged that with such a vast area to cover, it is impossible for his organization to tailor its promotional campaigns to any particular community.

“While we’re promoting Los Angeles and its regions,” Miller said, “San Pedro will have to look for the specific identity and hook, if you will, that will tie the name San Pedro to something in the consumer’s mind.”

The visitors and convention bureau considers San Pedro a coastal community, and markets it as such, lumping it in with beach cities such as Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo.

But San Pedro, although it does have a beach, is far from a beach city. Jayme Wilson, San Pedro Tourism Council president, says the main challenge of his group is to create name recognition for San Pedro by drawing attention to the features that make it different.

To that end, the council’s first major project was printing a slick, four-color tourist brochure, far more elaborate than previous pamphlets put out by the chamber.

The “Official 1989-90 Chamber of Commerce Visitor’s Guide,” which came off the presses two weeks ago, lists restaurants, hotels and San Pedro points of interest, both on the waterfront and elsewhere in town. The Angels Gate Cultural Center, the Point Fermin Lighthouse and the Korean Friendship Bell are all on the list, in addition to such port-related activities as dinner cruises.

Shuttle Service Planned

The tourism council printed 56,000 of the brochures, which were financed mostly by advertising, and has contracted with a company that will place the pamphlets in racks at hotels, the cruise center and other places frequented by travelers.

The second project planned by the group is a shuttle service that will link San Pedro’s various attractions. The San Pedro Revitalization Corp., which oversees an effort to upgrade the community’s downtown business district, is drawing up a plan for the shuttle, which the tourism council hopes will be partially funded by the Port of Los Angeles.

Although port officials have made no commitment to finance the shuttle, Mark Richter, assistant director of property management, said the Harbor Department is “quite willing to cooperate in that effort.”

Richter also said the Harbor Department expects to decide by the end of the month whether it will build San Pedro’s third new hotel, this one at the port’s World Cruise Center. He said the department is reviewing two proposals, one for a 240-room hotel and the other for a 180-room hotel.

In addition to the Compri and the Sheraton, San Pedro already has two other hotels, the 60-room San Pedro Grand on Gaffey Street and the 112-room Best Western Sunrise on Harbor Boulevard.

Some in San Pedro, particularly Gubler and Manny Aftergut, director of development for the lead partner in the Sheraton Hotel project, have expressed concerns that the market might not be able to bear another major hotel.

Richter said that the concern is “a very serious consideration” and that the port has conducted a marketing study to examine what effect another hotel would have on the local economy.

Although he declined to release the study, Richter noted that activity along the San Pedro waterfront, including two new dinner cruise vessels and sport fishing operations, are doing well. Ports O’Call Village, which grossed $23.9 million in sales during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1988, has grossed about $25 million this fiscal year, Richter said.

“Certainly,” he said, “San Pedro is not comparable with a Disneyland or an attraction of that kind, but as a waterfront setting with some interesting sights and attractions, I think there is excellent potential.”