San Diego Zoo and Sea World Seek to Attract More Corporate Groups : Marketing: Business gatherings, although representing a small percentage of income, help tourist attractions weather recession.
Although mothers and fathers with kids in tow make up the vast majority of people passing through turnstiles at Southern California’s major tourism attractions, families aren’t the only visitors that parks try to lure.
The San Diego Zoo, the Wild Animal Park, Sea World and other Southland parks also market themselves as fashionable alternatives for corporate groups in search of unusual meeting spaces that simply aren’t available at hotels.
Group business, largely corporate gatherings, accounted for just 3% of Sea World of California’s 3.8 million visitors during 1991, said Bill Thomas, Sea World’s vice president of marketing. Similarly, group business “isn’t our bread and butter,” said Patty Duran, a sales manager for the Zoological Society of San Diego.
But group meetings are one of the niches that, taken together, help the zoo and Sea World to weather recessions that lead consumers to postpone park trips.
Sea World, however, could face an uphill fight for group business if the state Department of Alcohol Beverage Control doesn’t reissue a license. A recent change in state law approved by the Assembly and Gov. Pete Wilson seems to have cleared the way for Sea World to once again hold a liquor license.
Sea World was forced to let its mixed-drink license lapse after Harcourt Brace Jovanovich sold its parks division to Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based brewery, in 1989. The park, which serves beer and wine to general park visitors, was forced to halt hard-alcohol sales to private groups because of an arcane state law that prohibits brewers from holding liquor licenses.
The Mission Bay aquatic park is “seeking to have the license restored to allow us to compete fully for the business of private functions that wish to have mixed drinks available,” said Sea World of California President C. Michael Cross. “Having our license restored will be a benefit to the overall ability of San Diego to attract convention and tourism business.”
Alcoholic beverages are “part and parcel of corporate gatherings,” said Patty Roscoe, founder and chairman of Patty Roscoe & Associates, a San Diego-based company that plans and stages meetings for corporate customers. “The moratorium on mixed drinks at Sea World definitely affected my business. . . . Several major groups pulled out, and we lost their business.”
The loss of Sea World’s liquor license has hurt San Diego “because we’re competing against Orlando, San Francisco, San Antonio. . . . and we need attractive meeting places,” Roscoe said. “The more attractive places we have, the better we’re able to do in this competitive business.”
Corporate meeting planners were delighted when, in July, the San Diego Zoo opened Treehouse, a multistory complex that includes a sit-down restaurant, a dedicated meeting-dining room, a gift shop and a catering center.
Albert’s, the new, sit-down restaurant and Treetops, which plays host to catered events, both enjoy access to a dramatic series of open-air balconies that make the facilities extremely attractive to meeting planners, Roscoe said.
“For the past 10 years, the destination management business has been pounding on the zoo to do something like that,” Roscoe said. “Again, it simply adds to the package that we can use to sell San Diego as a destination. We’re able to say we have fine hotels . . . but everyone has hotels.”
The zoo, which holds a complete liquor license, also makes available animals and animal trainers to entertain groups that meet in the park, Duran said. Corporate groups also are encouraged to make donations to the zoo through an animal sponsorship program.
The zoo has enjoyed an increase in business from corporate meeting planners who “have clients who are asking them to emphasize conservation and things which are in tune with the environment, which we definitely are,” Duran said.
Corporate meetings traditionally have helped to fill relatively slow periods during the tourism season. “While they’re not our bread and butter, they do help when the tourism season falls off . . . in the spring and the fall,” Duran said.
“And despite the recession, we had a great, great year for catered events during 1991.”
Thomas said the corporate gatherings represent a cost-effective way for parks to better utilize their animals, trainers and facilities.
“We can give them a reception, a dinner and a show, we can set them up in the Penguin Encounter (viewing area) . . . whatever they want,” Thomas said. “We’ll give them anything from a box lunch to a gourmet meal.”
The parks didn’t always view business meetings as desirable, however.
“In 1974, we had maybe four or five night meetings a year,” Thomas said. “But then I thought, airlines fly in the dark and hotels are open around the clock. . . . We grudgingly started to book groups. By the mid-1980s, we were hosting 100 night events a year.”
