Beverly Hills Wants You : Tourism: Hoteliers persuade City Council to renew a controversial $1.5-million ad campaign to attract visitors.

A group of major hoteliers in Beverly Hills persuaded the City Council this week to continue its support of a slick, $1.5-million advertising campaign designed to attract tourists.

The hoteliers--including the managers of the Peninsula Beverly Hills Hotel, the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the Beverly Hilton Hotel and the Beverly Hills Hotel--asked the city last year to raise the tax on hotel guests by two percentage points and dedicate the added revenue to a campaign touting the city as a tourist destination.

The campaign has consisted of three black-and-white ads this year in eight magazines, including the New Yorker, Forbes and Travel & Leisure. It also included a letter from the mayor mailed to more than 100,000 upper-income travelers, inviting them to take a walking tour of the city.

The Salt Lake City-based advertising company that developed the campaign, the Evans Group, plans to continue the magazine ads and expand them to the United Kingdom.

Councilwoman MeraLee Goldman said she objected to the trio of glossy, black-and-white ads for “The Province of Beverly Hills,” calling them demeaning.

“I made no bones that I did not like this ad from the beginning, and I take a very dim view of running it again,” she said.

The soft-lit ads depict an elegant couple in exclusive restaurants, hotels and shops. In handwritten letters to home at the bottom of the ad, they dwell on the decadence of the city, describing wine lists that stretch to Paris, hotels peopled with “the usual magazine cover crowd” and jewelry shops “packed with more ice than a skating rink.”

Goldman said that she felt the ads did not convey the message the city had agreed upon when originally approving the campaign, which was to encourage business travelers to bring along family members.

PKF Consulting, which monitors hotel operations, said that hotels in Beverly Hills saw their average occupancy rate increase to 72.4% from January through May this year, up from an average of 64.9% in 1994.

And the advertising agency estimates that the campaign had generated $3.1 million in additional spending at hotels, restaurants and stores this year.

Some council members suggested that the increases may have been attributable to factors other than advertising. “It may have been very successful because [the ad] was beautiful and elegant, but maybe it is just an upturn in the economy,” Goldman said.