Slaying Raises Concerns for Tourism

It was not exactly a civic booster’s dream come true: 5,000 travel agents in Los Angeles for the week, and no sooner had they arrived than a German tourist was slain in Santa Monica.

Cringing at every mention of the killing, L.A. city officials Wednesday did their best to balance their expressions of sympathy and sadness with their careful pleadings not to let the fear of crime outrun its reality.

This week’s slaying notwithstanding, they said again and again, crime is down in Los Angeles and surrounding areas, which have become far safer places in recent years.

Kicking off its annual convention, the American Society of Travel Agents was treated to a multimedia, multicultural show of music, dancers, skaters, gymnasts, singers and an angel suspended from the ceiling of the Los Angeles Convention Center. They heard from local dignitaries, including Mayor Richard Riordan and George Kirkland, the city’s garrulous salesman-in-chief, who bragged about the things to do and see in Los Angeles.

Still, the travel agents were well aware of the Santa Monica slaying. As they sipped coffee and nibbled at fruit plates early Wednesday, the subject was raised in hushed tones, as though to avoid offending their Los Angeles hosts.

Asked whether he thought foreigners were afraid to visit Los Angeles because of crime here, Karmi Benlian of Istanbul said: “They are definitely. And it seems to me that they should be. I turned on the news last night, and there is a German tourist who is dead. It’s a little bit scary.”

Bill Stose of Woodstock, Georgia, said he, too, was rattled by the slaying.

“It’s really unfortunate that a tourist had to be shot just as our convention was opening,” he said. “All of us are tourists, too.”

Comments like that are the last thing local leaders want to hear, especially in a city that prides itself on moving beyond the riots of 1992 and the shadow that devastating convulsion cast across Los Angeles’ reputation. Time and again, Riordan boasts of Los Angeles being “not just back, but better than ever,” and “poised to be the capital of the 21st century.”

But that’s a hard sell when the evening news and morning papers are splashed with a slaying. Horst Fietze, 50, was shot to death Monday night, allegedly when robbers approached him and his German companions and demanded money. The group did not understand the orders, police said, and Fietze was shot as the assailants tried to rummage through the tourists’ pockets.

The killing has received widespread coverage in Germany.

The coincidence that saw the slaying occur just as thousands of travel agents were descending on Los Angeles threatened to wildly magnify the civic ramifications of the killing. In the past, cities that have hosted the travel agent convention have seen a 15% to 20% jump in tourism in the year or two after the convention.

That has enormous implications for Los Angeles, where roughly 23 million visitors a year contribute billions of dollars to the area’s economy and help support hundreds of thousands of jobs. More than half of those visitors, according to figures supplied by the Convention and Visitors Bureau, come to Los Angeles on trips booked through travel agents.

If Los Angeles received a jump in tourism similar to that experienced by other cities after the national travel agent convention, it could mean more than $1 billion in local economic activity. That, plus the potential for long-term damage to the city’s reputation, caused officials to work overtime calming any nerves frayed by the Santa Monica slaying.

“It’s a horrible tragedy,” said Bob Moore, executive vice president of the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “And the timing is terrible. . . . We have to continue to work on our image relative to crime.”

Riordan did not directly refer to the slaying in his remarks to the convention, but he opened his speech with a pronounced emphasis on the city’s law enforcement record. Riordan told delegates crime has decreased precipitously since he became mayor, and that far more police officers today patrol Los Angeles streets.

The result, said Riordan: a “new, much better Los Angeles.”

Others stressed that the tourist shooting was the first in the area in nearly 20 years, and though city officials did not want to be quoted criticizing other cities’ crime records, they slyly dropped reminders about cities such as Miami, where a spate of tourist killings badly hurt that city’s travel industry.

Kirkland conceded that some potential tourists already are wary of Los Angeles’ reputation for crime.

On a recent trip by city officials to Asia, Japanese travel agents inquired about the city’s crime rate, and that issue continues to hurt Los Angeles in the Japanese tourist market, he said.

But he and others stressed that most of Los Angeles’ tourism comes from within the United States, and there the concern seems less pronounced.

Stose, who runs a travel service near Atlanta, generally agreed.

“I’m from Atlanta, and Atlanta has the same problem. Miami has a heck of a problem, but people still travel there.”

Los Angeles’ real liability, he said, is traffic. “That’s where you’ve got a real reputation,” he said. “That’s a problem.”