Orange County Frets About Losing Visitors : Tourism: Business leaders are moving toward a collective marketing campaign for the area.
Worried that vacationers are going to more glamorous locations, tourism and elected officials in Orange County say their region is not doing enough to promote itself, even though the county still has much to offer visitors.
While cities such as San Diego and Las Vegas have unified advertising promotions to lure billions of dollars in tourist spending, Orange County’s efforts have been largely fragmented among individual attractions and convention bureaus.
To fix the problem, leaders appear to be leaning toward launching a splashy promotion campaign that would create a separate identity for Orange County as a prime destination in Southern California. Tourism is a $4.8-billion-a-year business in Orange County.
“We have to make Los Angeles a suburb: Stay here and maybe you’ll get into L.A.,” said retired Disneyland president Jack Lindquist, a panelist in a meeting of top local tourism officials in Orange County last week.
The separatist movement has been steadily gaining strength amid the string of misfortune that has hit Los Angeles--from riots and wildfires to floods and earthquakes.
The outcry picked up steam with the recent killings of two Japanese students in San Pedro--heavily publicized in Japan as another example of violence run rampant in the United States.
Orange County officials complain that L.A.’s bad publicity has washed over and hurt tourist attendance at Disneyland and the other visitor attractions, particularly among the big-spending Japanese.
Making matters worse, other cities have backed their convention and vacation businesses with major advertising campaigns.
Las Vegas’ visitor bureau, for instance, is spending $16.4 million to promote its new family-friendly image compared to Anaheim’s $250,000, according to the Anaheim Area Visitor & Convention Bureau.
Convention authorities in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco also advertise more than Anaheim, which has one of the nation’s largest convention centers. Orlando, Fla., a backwater 25 years ago, today is in the top rank of amusement and convention destinations.
The problem, said Anaheim Marriott general manager Ned Snavely, is that Orange County lacks “marquee value” compared to those other cities. Visitors know Disneyland, but they don’t know the other attractions.
The solution, local leaders agree, is to find a way to market the county as a whole, plugging everything from the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park to the mission in San Juan Capistrano.
“We need to sell the county and look at it as a collective,” said Anaheim convention bureau President Charles Ahlers.
Just where to find the money for such a program, however, was not clear.
County Supervisor William G. Steiner said he wants to explore whether the county’s 31 cities that already tax hotel stays--Anaheim’s “transient occupancy tax” rate is 13%, for instance--would be willing to dedicate part of it to overall promotion.
Anaheim has occasionally raised the notion of a tax on admissions to gated attractions, but the idea has been flatly opposed by Disneyland, which wields considerable political and economic power in the city.
