Sea World to Add Exhibits Following Summer Boom : Leisure: Tourism in San Diego County was down in 1992, but the aquatic park expects an attendance record.

Flush from a banner summer in which attendance was boosted to record heights by the impact of the Los Angeles riots and cheap air fares, Sea World of San Diego announced Tuesday it will build two new aquatic exhibits and renovate its existing dolphin stadium.

The new projects, part of a $50-million upgrading of the park in progress since Anheuser--Busch acquired the site in 1989, will go ahead despite overall sluggishness in San Diego County’s tourism over the first nine months of 1992. Sea World officials say they expect attendance to set records this year.

Bill Thomas, Sea World’s senior vice president of marketing, said one of the reasons for the record attendance is a negative perception that many tourists have of the Los Angeles area--and by extension its theme parks--in the aftermath of the April riots.

The several earthquakes that struck Southern California over the summer also contributed to a negative public perception of Los Angeles held by many out-of-state tourists. And that worked to Sea World’s advantage, Thomas said.

“We don’t like to benefit from other people’s problems, but there’s no doubt the civil unrest in Los Angeles helped us,” Thomas said. Disneyland and Los Angeles tourism officials told him of a “doughnut affect”--how hotels and attractions in downtown Los Angeles struggled and how tourists went to places outside the center of the city.

Thomas said cheap air fares offered over the summer as a result of airline price wars also boosted attendance, judging from the fact that Sea World attendance was sluggish the first five months months of the year.

The centerpiece of Sea World’s new construction will be called Rocky Point Preserve, an exhibit that will consist of Dolphin Bay and Otter Outlook. To open by Memorial Day next year, the exhibit will try to “recreate the Pacific Coast habitats” of the animals.

Otter Outlook will be home to sea otters brought to Sea World following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989. Many of the dolphins to be shown at the exhibit were born in Sea World. The aquatic park’s breeding program has produced births of 50 bottlenose dolphins.

Sea World also plans to give a major overhaul to its dolphin stadium, officials said.

While declining to release precise figures, Sea World said its 1992 attendance will surpass last year’s record 3.8 million.

But other tourist attractions in the city aren’t nearly so euphoric. Attendance is down by 14% so far this year at the San Diego Zoo and down by 2% at the Wild Animal Park, zoo spokesman Jeff Jouett said Tuesday.

Combined turnstile clicks through August at San Diego’s museums are down 14% from the first eight months last year, the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau said Tuesday. The most recent figures available for total visitors and visitor spending in the county are flat at best.

“Our feeling is that the attendance decline is a general response to the recessionary economy,” Jouett said. “If you look all around, the declining attendance at theaters, sporting events and the Del Mar Fair are just examples of the general economic slump.”

Jouett conceded that the zoo’s attendance has been hurt this year by the lack of new exhibits such as last year’s Gorilla Tropics. Theme park officials say new shows--such as Sea World’s Shark Encounter that opened in June--are necessary marketing tools that parks use to entice visitors to return to the parks.

In a bid to boost attendance, the zoo will open Pygmy Chimpanzee Habitat next April, a $4-million project now under construction.

But San Diego’s slumping tourism is an indication that Southern California’s recession is outlasting the rest of the nation. The region’s economic health is important to San Diego attractions: at Sea World, for example, about half of the park’s attendance comes from Southern California.

Tim O’Brien, an editor of Amusement Business Newsweekly, a Nashville-based trade publication, said Southern California’s tourism is in a deeper slump than the rest of the nation. His publication is predicting that attendance at U.S. theme parks overall will increase between 3% and 5% this year over 1991.