Tourism Effort Focuses on Bakersfield

Every year in the heat of the summer, about the time the thermometer hits triple digits, images of the Pacific Ocean, the beach and the lush green hillsides around Ventura appear on Bakersfield television sets.

For thousands of Bakersfield residents, the impulse to hop in the car and head for Ventura is impossible to resist.

So for the past four years, Bakersfield has become the prime focus of Ventura’s efforts to promote tourism. It is the only city that Ventura specifically targets with a media and public relations campaign.

The efforts have paid off. In response to newspaper and television ads and assorted sales pitches to travel agencies and corporations, about 4,000 Bakersfield residents came to Ventura and spent more than $400,000 this past summer, Ventura officials said this week.

During the rest of the year, weekend getaways by Bakersfield residents typically pump another $100,000 into Ventura’s tourism economy, said Russ Smith, executive director of Ventura’s Visitor and Convention Bureau.

Officials say the tourism connection is a natural consequence of the many characteristics the cities have in common:

The economies of both cities are outgrowths of the oil and agriculture industries. Their populations are moderately affluent and highly educated, and both cities are within the sphere of influence of Los Angeles but far enough away to forge their own identities.

“We’re both salt-of-the-earth type of people,” said Larry Shallock, whose Landborn Travel Agency in Bakersfield books two or three hotel stays at Ventura every week.

“A lot of people who used to work in Ventura’s oil fields have moved to Bakersfield, and they like to come back,” Smith said.

But even more important than what the cities have in common is that key difference, which Ventura’s tourism promoters stress when it is most apparent: Ventura is cool when Bakersfield is hot.

“In July, when it gets nice and hot in Bakersfield, we make a media blitz,” Smith said. “We buy space on the local newspaper and TV channel, and show them pictures of the ocean and that type of thing.”

And during the spring, a sales representative from Ventura’s tourism bureau goes to Bakersfield’s travel agencies, pitching the advantages Ventura offers over its potential competitors--virtually any other city on the coast.

Overall, the bureau spends $8,000 per year on its Bakersfield campaign, Smith said--far less than it would cost to bombard larger, more expensive markets such as Los Angeles.

Bakersfield’s travel agents are happy to pass the word along--and book hotel rooms for the standard commission.

“We tell our costumers that Ventura is a nice alternative,” said D. Shay Deweese, who owns Cloud 9 Travel in Bakersfield. “It’s closer than San Diego and more affordable than Santa Barbara.”

Smith said that with only 99 miles of highway between them, Ventura is the closest destination for Bakersfield residents who want to jump into the ocean.

Such proximity is not ignored by Bakersfield travelers such as Jake Wager, the head of that city’s Finance and Community Relations Department, who comes to Ventura two or three times a year to indulge in scuba diving, his favorite pastime.

“If you pull out a compass and look west, you see Ventura and Santa Barbara. If you want a beach experience, that’s where you go,” he said.

Of the two cities, he said, Ventura is the sentimental favorite since a Bakersfield newspaper quoted the mayor of Santa Barbara suggesting that her city’s homeless would be happier in Bakersfield.

Wager is Smith’s idea of the ideal tourist--he likes the ocean, he’s upwardly mobile, he usually gets the weekends off, and, most important, he owns a car and doesn’t mind using it.

“Since we don’t have a regional airport, we depend on motorists,” Smith said.

While Wager said he enjoys Ventura’s beauty, its convenience is the main draw. “It’s quite nice, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s spectacular,” he said.

So far the tourism flow between the two cities has been somewhat one-sided. But Judy Valenzuela of the Bakersfield Visitors and Convention Bureau said it doesn’t have to be that way.

“Bakersfield has a wide variety of ethnic food restaurants, first-class hotels and great sporting events year-round,” she said.