Need Info? Get Ready for the Virtual Tourist Office

Many foreign tourist offices in the U.S. these days might as well hang out signs saying “Gone Webbin.’” The days when prospective travelers could walk into a tourist office and pick up brochures or get a human being on the phone are waning as more offices shift operations to call centers and the Internet. Call them “virtual tourist offices.”

If you dial Tourism New Zealand’s new toll-free information number, (866) 639-9325, you’ll get a nearly two-minute recorded menu that, among other things, routes you to another toll-free number for information about “touring New Zealand as Middle-earth” (a reference to “Lord of the Rings,” shot in New Zealand), gives you four other numbered options and refers you more than once to its Web site, www.purenz.com. To talk to a staff member, you must call its Santa Monica headquarters at (310) 395-7480 or visit its offices at 501 Santa Monica Blvd. between 9 a.m. and noon.

When you call the Mexico Tourism Board’s toll-free number, (800) 446-3942, you’ll be speaking with someone at a call center in Bend, Ore.

Each day, about 16,000 people visit Switzerland Tourism’s Internet site, www.myswitzerland.com, but only about 200 call its North American offices in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto, says Urs Eberhard, the New York-based director for the agency in North America.

It’s not that full-service tourist offices have disappeared. The Bahamas, which has one of the larger operations, fields about 80 people to staff its five North American offices. Its largest one, in Miami, has specialists who can counsel travelers on weddings, boating and other niches.

But as the statistics indicate, more travelers are migrating to the Internet or slogging through toll-free telephone menus to get maps, brochures and other information, such as regional food specialties and attractions for children, that they previously got from visiting or calling staff at a tourism office.

Government austerity in Europe and the prolonged recession in Asia have squeezed many foreign government tourist outposts. “Every year our budget gets cut,” says Marian Goldberg, spokeswoman for the Japan National Tourist Organization in New York. She says her office copes by mailing fewer pieces of literature, relying on e-mail and directing tourists to its Web site, www.jnto.go.jp.

At the Australian Tourist Commission in Los Angeles, spokeswoman Rachel Crowley says, “We’re trying to point a lot of people to the Web [www.australia.com].... It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than having live people answer the calls.”

Walk-in visitors may be subtly discouraged by some foreign tourist offices; other offices are officially closed to the public and market only to the trade, such as travel agents and tour operators.

“In New York there are virtually no street-level [tourist] offices anymore” among members of the European Travel Commission, says spokesman Neil S. Martin. As recently as the mid-1990s there were several, he says.

The Internet provides potential visitors with a vast amount of information on subjects as diverse as visas and tour operators--and you don’t have to wait weeks to receive it, as is often the case with phone-ordered brochures. Tourism New Zealand’s site, for instance, lists hundreds of places to stay, from backpacker hostels to luxury hotels, in a database you can search by price range; calculates distances and driving times between cities; and lists more than 70 bus companies, among other things.

Operators at some 800 numbers offer limited information on the destination they represent; others seem more eager to collect marketing data on the callers, such as age, ZIP Code and how they learned of the 800 number, than provide information.

But many are helpful. For instance, the 30 operators in Florida who answer calls to 800-BAHAMAS (224-2627) are either natives of the islands or have visited them, and they also get regular training, according to Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, director general of the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism. They can put callers through directly to information sources in the Bahamas, and since January they’ve been able to book vacations for callers, he says. The number gets about 800 calls a day, compared with about 80,000 daily hits on the ministry’s Web site, www.bahamas.com. The figure for walk-ins to its offices is so small that it’s “insignificant,” says Vanderpool-Wallace, adding: “We don’t even track it anymore.”

What if you can’t find the answers you need on a tourist office’s Web site or at its toll-free phone? Your options are narrowing.

Many tourist offices were cutting back even before Sept. 11. In the last five years, among the European Travel Commission’s member nations, Bulgaria has closed its New York headquarters, Greece has closed its Chicago and Los Angeles branches, Germany has closed its Los Angeles branch and the Netherlands and Switzerland have closed their Chicago branches. In the same period, Portugal, the Slovak Republic and Romania opened new offices.

The tourist offices of Mexico and Indonesia scaled back their U.S. staff and moved them into consulates in 1998. Australia, which once had three U.S. offices, now has only one. The Seychelles closed its New York office last summer, and the Cook Islands transferred its North American operation from Los Angeles to Toronto.

Since Sept. 11 there have been a few more cutbacks. The Cayman Islands announced Nov. 26 it was reducing its U.S. tourist staff from 51 to 34 and closing its Los Angeles branch; it still has offices in New York and Miami. By today the Hong Kong Tourism Board was expected to have closed its Chicago branch; it still has offices in Los Angeles and New York.

In January the French Government Tourist Office branch in Los Angeles closed its doors to the public “because we don’t have the staff to welcome them,” says Rick Graham, promotions and public relations manager. (The change was planned before Sept. 11.) The office used to get 25 to 30 walk-ins and “maybe 60 phone calls” a day, he said. It lost two of its five staff members last year and now operates as a marketing office to the trade. Only the head New York office is open to the public, he says.

By contrast, Switzerland Tourism has responded to the travel slump by increasing its staff from 17 to 25 in North America, welcoming walk-ins at its New York office, increasing its marketing budget and redirecting phone calls from a fulfillment house back to the tourist office, says Eberhard. “We want to know what the consumer wants,” he says.

The British Tourist Authority, staggering from the combined effects of Sept. 11 and last year’s foot-and-mouth epidemic, will launch a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign next month aimed at getting U.S. visitors to return.

*

Jane Engle welcomes comments and suggestions but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.