TOURISM : Shift in Marketing Brings New Flocks of Mission Visitors

The swallows aren’t the only ones flocking north to Mission San Juan Capistrano. Consider the tourists.

After a shift in direct marketing strategy, scheduled tours to the mission rose 97% in February and 31% in January, compared to the same months a year earlier. And for all of 1989, tourism was up by more than a third over the previous year, according to mission statistics.

Brian McInerney, the mission’s director of marketing, said he hoped that the mission might appeal to more local groups that could spend a day at the site rather than fight heavy freeway traffic to visit another attraction.

So he started promoting the landmark, now 214 years old, to groups in the Inland Empire and San Diego County, instead of just Los Angeles and Orange counties. As a result, the number of scheduled tours--as opposed to walk-in visitors--rose quickly.

There were more than 200 tours in the first two months of 1990. McInerney will not disclose how many visitors were in those groups, saying only that visitor volume is healthier than ever.

The effort to try to bring in more groups began about three years ago, he said: “What we’re seeing now are the results of it.”

The mission’s marketing effort includes ads and a direct-mail campaign to groups. McInerney has also made presentations to the staffs of major hotels from Newport Beach to the Mexican border to let them know about the mission’s attractions.

Besides being conveniently situated roughly an hour’s drive from San Diego and parts of the Riverside-San Bernardino area, the mission is just 600 yards from San Juan Capistrano’s picturesque Amtrak station.