THE RIOT’S AFTERMATH : S.D. Tourism Officials Will Join in Effort to Counter Effects of Riot : Vacationers: Government and tourist industry will work to calm fears of tourists. San Diego and other California cities will also distance themselves from Los Angeles.

San Diego County tourism officials on Friday will join a statewide meeting of industry figures who are seeking ways of allaying fears among out-of-state tourists who might skip California vacations during coming months because of the Los Angeles riots.

The meeting, which is sponsored by the state Commerce Department, will be held at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel. Attending will be state legislators and representatives of convention and visitors bureaus from around the state, the California Tourism Commission, the California Tourism Corp. and the California Travel Industry Assn.

Officials will discuss “smart ways in which the public and private sector can work together” to allay the fears of tourists stemming from the chaos of last week’s riots and who may be unfamiliar with the state’s geography, said state Commerce Dept. spokeswoman Jeanne Winnick.

“Many people just don’t know that the Redwoods are far away from Los Angeles and that Yosemite is a far cry from Los Angeles,” Winnick said.

The meeting could lead to a blending of public and private funds for a marketing campaign that would address those fears, Winnick said. “We’ve gotten together after other . . . disasters, such as earthquakes or the prolonged drought,” Winnick said.

San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau (ConVis) Chairwoman Anne Evans and President Reint Reinders, who will travel to Los Angeles on Friday for the meeting, applauded Sacramento officials for calling the meeting.

“We are linking arms and recognizing that we share a common fate,” Evans said. There is a perception among tourists that LA’s problems are the state’s problems, Evans said. “The perception is that we share their market and their prosperity.”

San Diego tourism officials, who spent the spring dealing with negative publicity generated by a massive sewage leak offshore from Point Loma, now must “deal with what happened last week and . . . deal with it directly,” Evans said. “We sitting here in San Diego can’t pretend that (the violence) didn’t occur in our neighbor community.”

ConVis telephone operators received dozens of telephone calls from potential tourists during the height of the riots, Reinders said, but many tourists seem to understand that San Diego had been spared, Reinders said.

“We told people that everything is fine in San Diego, that we have no problems,” Reinders said. “We told them it was business as usual.”

But San Diego’s tourism industry “will have some outfall from the riots,” Reinders said. For example, international visitors, “who don’t know their way around California, might cancel tours” that involve San Diego, Reinders said.

Evans was uncertain what would be accomplished at Friday’s meeting.

But she maintained that tourists will avoid California unless “there is a real focus and a will to protect individuals and property.” Civic leaders have to step forward and confirm that people are still being received, and that the state can assure their safety, she said.

For local tourism officials, the riot underscored the importance of a relatively new marketing campaign that seeks to position San Diego as a separate and distinct tourist destination from Los Angeles.

For decades, San Diego’s tourism industry was content to live in Los Angeles’ shadow, largely because local hotel rooms were usually filled by Californians living within a day’s drive.

But room occupancy rates, long among the nation’s highest, tumbled during recent years as the supply of hotel rooms in the county grew by 42% to more than 40,000. Hotels and tourism officials responded by beefing up advertising and marketing budgets aimed at the in-state tourists who still account for the majority of tourists in San Diego.

Officials also have begun to seriously court tourists from the Eastern United States and foreign countries. ConVis officials last year unveiled a $21.6-million package that, if funded by local governments later this year, will allow San Diego to actively pursue those faraway tourists.

Meanwhile, Hawaii’s tourism trade appears to be benefiting from last week’s rioting in Los Angeles. A number of island tour companies said Tuesday that they booked packages for hundreds of Japanese tourists scheduled to visit Los Angeles, but who have changed their minds because of the violence that erupted in the wake of the Rodney G. King beating verdict.

Wil Hokama of JTB Hawaii, a large Japanese tour company, said nearly 400 Japanese tourists have already changed their Los Angeles plans and booked trips to Hawaii instead.

“Definitely, there was an effect,” Hokama said.

Information from Times wire services included in this story.