Hotels Join Forces to Lure More Tourists to San Diego Area : Marketing: San Diego Tourism Assn. finds, as do similar groups elsewhere, that selling an area is vital.
Macy’s might not share its business secrets with Gimbel’s, but a group of executives at competing hotels has joined forces to help fill San Diego County’s glut of empty hotel rooms.
The San Diego Tourism Assn. was formed early this summer to augment individual hotels’ existing marketing and advertising programs and provide “more bang for the marketing buck,” said Robert Rauch, a San Diego-based tourism consultant and the association’s founder and president.
The association’s 12 members, including the Regency Plaza Hotel in Mission Valley, the Del Mar Hilton and the Lawrence Welk Resort in Escondido, have contributed a total of $300,000 to finance newspaper and radio advertisements in the Greater Los Angeles and Arizona markets that generate the lion’s share of San Diego’s overnight visitors.
Without naming individual hotels, the association’s radio and newspaper advertisements in Los Angeles, Orange County and Arizona offer tourists a wide variety of tour packages, including a Mexican shopping spree, golf packages and reservations on a cruise ship that stops in San Diego.
Hotel operators, generally an independent group, opted to join together to help combat hotel occupancy rates that, hurt by new hotel openings and the recession, are hovering at a dismal 63%.
Although rates are flat compared to a year ago, they probably would have tumbled below 63% had not local properties and the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau, or ConVis, strengthened advertising and marketing budgets, ConVis spokesman Richard Ledford said Monday.
The new tourism association might seem to be in competition with ConVis, the quasi-public agency that is charged with promoting tourism in San Diego County. But, “when it comes to advertising that will fill hotel rooms, the more the merrier, as far as we’re concerned,” Ledford said.
The new association’s marketing plan also has drawn praise from the Hotel and Motel Assn., a San Diego trade group which has a vested interest in raising room occupancy rates.
“We welcome them, as long as the advertising doesn’t pit one part of San Diego against another, say, downtown against Mission Bay,” said Hotel and Motel Assn. President William Evans, who also is manager of the Bahia Resort Hotel in Mission Bay.
Rauch said that the association has no intention of luring business at the expense of a given part of San Diego, such as downtown or Mission Bay. To that end, the association sought out 12 properties in all from the around the county, including the South Bay, Mission Valley, Escondido and Del Mar.
Instead of including the names of participating hotels, the ads pitch packages that include hotel rooms near the county’s many tourist attractions, such as Sea World, the Zoo, beaches and golf courses. Specific hotel names aren’t mentioned because the association’s main purpose is to bolster San Diego’s overall image as a tourism destination, Rauch said.
That strategy of selling an overall destination rather than individual properties is increasingly popular among tourism agencies that are battling to attract visitors, said Richard Geiger, director of convention sales and marketing for the Orlando-Orange County Convention and Visitors Bureau.
“You have to sell the destination first,” Geiger said. “We say, ‘Come to Orlando or Central Florida,’ and we’ll worry later about where you’re going to stay . . . each attraction or hotel will fight for a piece of the pie, but unless you get people there, there’s nothing to fight for.”
By combining advertising dollars, “we can sometimes get 50% off the (going) advertising rate,” Geiger said. “That’s especially true now with the (dire) financial conditions out there . . . everyone’s starting to pool their revenues to get a bigger bang for the buck.
The association “seems like a good idea, it’s the smart thing to do in this kind of economy,” said Tim Smith, president of San Diego Travel, a local travel agency. “It’s an example of people taking a creative approach to how they’re marketing their product.”
In addition to contributing the new association’s $300,000 advertising budget, member hotels have pledged 2% of their available rooms for use by the association as “prizes” for travel agents and others who book tourists or group travel to San Diego.
Other rooms are swapped to radio stations in exchange for air time. Radio stations then use rooms as prizes on on-air contests.
Rauch said members are pleased with the first round of advertisements that ran recently in the Los Angeles area. It generated more than 350 reservations for a package that included a hotel room and admission to Sea World and the San Diego Zoo. “We thought that was a tremendous response,” Rauch said.
