Campaign Created to Lure Tourists to Newport Beach : Promotion: The visitors bureau plans to change the image of the city, hoping to compete with San Diego and Santa Barbara as a resort area.

To hear the Newport Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau tell it, people have a lot to learn about this seaside city.

At the group’s quarterly meeting at the Balboa Bay Club on Wednesday night, bureau President Richard Gartrell unveiled the group’s slick and colorful marketing campaign aimed at creating a new image of Newport Beach in the minds of business travelers and tourists. The campaign, called “Newport Beach, the Colorful Coast,” portrays the city as a dynamic place to visit.

Drawing from the preliminary results of a recent market study comparing Newport Beach to San Diego, Gartrell said people perceive Newport Beach as a less “modern” city, more expensive and offering fewer recreational activities than San Diego.

The bureau wants to change that perception.

The campaign will include a variety of sales techniques such as advertisements in trade and travel publications and travel packages arranged by airlines and travel agencies. Gartrell said the bureau is trying to draw people away from Newport Beach’s geographic competitors: San Diego, Santa Barbara and Palm Springs.

“The idea is to get them to Newport Beach,” Gartrell said. “Once they’re here, it’s a done deal.”

Although the perception of Newport Beach may not be exactly what local officials would have liked to hear, Gartrell and other bureau officials have few doubts about selling the city that offers the Fashion Island shopping center, the Back Bay ecological preserve and miles of beaches.

“We finally have enough information to say that we really are becoming a destination place in a lot of ways,” said Toni Alexander, president of InterCommunications Inc., the marketing group hired by the bureau. “The whole phenomenon of becoming a resort is just beginning to happen.”

The marketing plan includes more publicity for local events, publishing a visitor’s guide to local restaurants and hotels, sending mailers to business travelers and talking to conference planners and travel agents.

Wednesday night’s presentation marked the first time that a detailed marketing plan for Newport Beach has been offered in the areas of public relations, advertising and sales.

With an annual operating budget of $875,000, the bureau receives 90% of its funding from Newport Beach in the form of a percentage point of the hotel room tax. In a city with more than 2,600 hotel rooms, that amounts to about $700,000 a year. The remaining funding comes from bureau members who pay an annual fee to the organization.

More than 2,600 conferences were held during 1989 in Newport Beach hotels, bringing more than $64 million in travel-related revenue to the area.