ConVis President to Resign After 18 Years at Helm

Longtime tourism marketing leader Dal L. Watkins announced his resignation Friday after 18 years as president of the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau.

In a letter to Anne L. Evans, chairman of the ConVis Board of Directors, Watkins said he has a chance to do tourism consulting as well as try his hand at personal business opportunities.

Watkins, 59, will remain as ConVis president while the board undertakes a nationwide search for a successor in the post, which oversees the county’s third-largest industry--after manufacturing and military--composed of such disparate groups as hotels, museums, amusement parks and restaurants.

“Dal has devoted his heart and soul to promoting tourism and conventions for San Diego,” Evans said in a prepared statement. “The tourism industry owes him a great debt for his leadership during this period.”

During his tenure, tourism in San Diego multiplied, as demonstrated by the increase in hotel rooms from 10,000 to more than 42,000 today. ConVis expanded from 15 employees to 77, and its budget zoomed to $8.5 million from a half-million dollars annually in 1972, with 1,500 public and private organization members of ConVis today.

In 1990, 35.7 million people visited San Diego for a day or longer, generating an estimated $3.4 billion in revenue for public and private coffers.

Watkins said that, during his tenure, “San Diego has grown into a sophisticated city and one of the nation’s most important vacation and convention destinations. As the tourism industry has grown and prospered in that time, so has all of San Diego County realized great economic benefits.”

Watkins came to the ConVis post from an administrative post with United Airlines in San Francisco. Before that, he had been United’s district manager in San Diego and had served on the ConVis board.

His time as president was not without controversy.

In 1984, Watkins came under fire from San Diego hoteliers to reorganize ConVis or resign after Hotel-Motel Assn. representatives complained that Watkins’ organization was not generating enough marketing efforts for county hotels, in particular in the way that ConVis focused on San Diego-bound convention groups.

But the furor died down later in the year after Watkins reorganized the bureau to come up with more convention leads for local hotels.