Tourism Outlook Gloomy After Unrest, Quakes : Visitors: Valley-area attractions show minimal impact, but observers countywide are calling this a bad year.

It’s the year of living dangerously for tourism in the San Fernando Valley area, even though some recent visitors to major attractions vow they won’t be stopped by natural and human calamities.

“Cancel my trip here? No way!” Gene Goff, 38, of Medford, Ore., said recently at Magic Mountain near Valencia. “California would have to fall in the ocean before I’d even think about doing that!”

Yet experts gloomily predict that the $7-billion-a-year industry in Los Angeles County may nose-dive by as much as $1.1 billion during the next 12 months, the victim of riots, earthquakes and economic malaise.

“So far, we’ve had about as bad a year, countywide, as we could ever imagine,” said Gary Sherwin, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau. As a result, Sherwin said, the bureau projects a loss of 31,000 jobs during the next 12 months in the hospitality and travel industry’s service sector--notably among hotel housekeepers, bartenders, waiters and dishwashers--thereby triggering even more ripples across the region’s battered economy. The riots that followed the April 29 verdicts in the Rodney King beating case have caused bigger tremors in the tourism industry than the earthquakes, many experts say.

One post-riot study conducted in May projects losses of 17% to 18% in tourism revenues for Los Angeles. Hardest hit are hotels in downtown Los Angeles and in Hollywood.

Valley hotels actually benefited slightly because tourists have booked rooms here as an alternative to those closer to the riot-torn areas, said Bruce Baltin of PKF Consulting, which conducted the survey for the Convention and Visitors Bureau. But even so, Baltin said, he has had to revise Valley hotel occupancy projections for 1992 downward--from 64.3% to 62%--continuing a steady decline from 75% as recently as four years ago.

“The impact of the earthquakes tends to go away faster than that of the riots,” Baltin said. “People expect that we’ll always have earthquakes. But the riots have reinforced the negative images of L.A, especially in the international market.”

Indeed, one Valley teacher lost out on a one-year fellowship in Scotland, a Valley tourism industry official said. “It was supposed to be an exchange, with a teacher in Scotland to come here,” she said. “The teacher in Scotland decided to stay home--all because of the riots.”

One small but significant barometer of tourism is Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, where on days before the rioting, crowds of visitors jammed the front courtyard and tour buses double-parked, said Jack Kyser, chief economist of the Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit ombudsman agency that tries to keep jobs from leaving Los Angeles County. “For about a month after the riots, the crowds outside the theater were no longer dense,” Kyser said. “Now, they’re starting to come back. The same pattern has occurred after the earthquakes.”

So far, Valley-area tourist attractions such as Universal Studios and Magic Mountain show minimal impact by the riots and earthquakes, which spokesmen hope will be temporary, they say.

At Universal, which ranks fourth in the nation for attendance among theme parks, officials hope to rebound from a lingering slump with “Backdraft,” which opened last Wednesday and re-creates special effects from a warehouse fire in the 1991 motion picture of the same name. Officials note an “erosion” in visitors from Japan and the United Kingdom--foreign visitors account for 45% of attendance.

“Private industry is doing its part, and I hope the public sector will follow, to market tourism vigorously in this area,” said Joan Bullard, Universal Studios’ vice president of public relations. “The dollars people spend as tourists benefit everyone--right down to the mom and pop stores.”

At Magic Mountain, which ranks eighth nationally in attendance and where about 85% of the park’s 3.2 million visitors come from Southern California, attendance was “relatively light” on June 28, spokeswoman Eileen Harrell said. She noted that it was the Sunday that two major earthquakes shook the area, and that authorities called an emergency and urged residents to stay home.

But some recent visitors seemed confident enough to patronize the park anyway.

“The age group that mostly comes here are kids just out of school for the summer,” Joy Mora of Granada Hills said, arriving with her small daughter. “They don’t really think about earthquakes.”

She looked up at one of Magic Mountain’s seven roller coasters, which roared high above the parking lot. “I’m sure they’ve got that roller coaster as secure as my house,” she said.

Oregon visitor Gene Goff’s brother, John, 39, of Lancaster, agreed. “If things weren’t really safe,” he said, “I’m sure they’d close this place.”