Mayor Urges Residents to Invite Out-of-Towners to See Cup Races : Tourism: O’Connor announces campaign to boost disappointing attendance at America’s Cup regatta.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor called on San Diego residents Thursday to invite their family and friends to town in a joint campaign with businesses to stimulate tourism during the upcoming America’s Cup finals.

The campaign, which is underwritten by San Diego Trust & Savings Bank, urges San Diegans to “keep San Diego’s economy strong” by inviting out-of-town friends and relatives to the races. O’Connor kicked off the program during a Thursday press conference by inviting a pair of friends from Paris.

But some local tourism industry observers questioned how effective the campaign will be.

“It’s going to be difficult to invite friends and relatives to come to town, and then tell them to stay at a hotel,” said one observer. It might also be difficult to persuade potential visitors to spend freely for airplane tickets, hotel rooms and meals when many Americans still harbor doubts about the nation’s economic health.

The Cup program is designed to help stimulate the stalled local economy, which has been hurt by layoffs, defense spending cuts and a soft real estate market.

“We could wait for the economy to turn around, or we could do something about it,” Parker Pike, a spokesman for the America’s Cup Organizing Committee, said. “This is a self-help program” for San Diego.

San Diegans are being asked to submit the names and addresses of friends and relatives for a drawing that will be held May 1. The out-of-town winner will receive two airplane tickets, meals, hotel rooms, meals and cash. But the city will not follow up by sending promotional literature to the losers, they said.

Reint Reinders, president of the Convention & Visitors Bureau, said Thursday that the program could help lift local hotel occupancy rates. The final four racing syndicates will begin competing later this month, and the America’s Cup winner will be determined during a best-of-seven series that begins May 9.

The conspicuous absence of tourists during preliminary rounds of the world’s best-known sailing race has been doubly painful for hotels, restaurants and other tourism-related businesses that still haven’t recovered from the dulling impact of the Gulf War and economic recession. The local hotel industry was further hurt by the glut of new hotel rooms that opened in recent years.

Consequently, “many (hoteliers) are really concerned,” Reinders said Thursday.

Reinders acknowledged that some hotel owners expected too much from the Cup’s preliminary races. It was unrealistic to believe that early races would generate enough traffic to fill “300 to 400 rooms each night,” Reinders said.

Although the Cup’s preliminary races have disappointed tourism officials, “interest is building,” said Rushton Hays, general manager of the Rancho Bernardo Inn and president of the San Diego County Hotel Motel Assn.

But Hays cautioned that “you’ll never draw many people until the finals. . . . People don’t care about it until then.”

Local expectations were sky-high more than a year ago when the nonprofit America’s Cup Organizing Committee endorsed an independently prepared economic impact study that predicted a $1-billion Cup windfall in San Diego County.

By late last year, it was evident that the $1 billion figure was too high. Last fall, Robert Rauch, a local hotel industry consultant, predicted that the economic impact would probably be less than half that, about $450 million.

“I think the America’s Cup organization was expecting numbers to be pretty heavy as we got into April,” Rauch said Thursday. “But I never thought it would be here . . . based on what occurred” at the Cup race held in Perth, Australia in 1987. “No one came to the (preliminary) races,” Rauch said. “People only come during the championship rounds.”

Mayor O’Connor downplayed speculation that there is no interest in the Cup.

“There’s excitement around the world about coming to San Diego,” O’Connor said. The mayor added that friends in Europe have told her that “San Diego is becoming much more of an international spot for Europeans than Rome.”