Add Santa Monica to the list of hottest L.A.-area tourist attractions.
The city’s hotels are enjoying the highest occupancy rates in the county, and visitor spending hit $700 million this year up from $288 million in 1989.
City officials and travel industry experts attribute the tourism boom to a variety of factors, including a boost in foreign tourists, new attractions like the Santa Monica Pier and Third Street Promenade, and the growth of the entertainment industry in the area which has made Santa Monica more of a business destination.
And it hasn’t hurt that President Clinton usually stays at the Miramar Sheraton in Santa Monica when he comes to Southern California.
“The city has done a great job of making itself an attractive place for visitors from here and abroad,” said travel consultant Bruce Baltin with PKF Consulting Inc. in Los Angeles,
The city’s hotels averaged an 82.7 percent occupancy rate in the first half of the year, Baltin said, while room prices were up 10 percent over the same period last year.
Foreign visitors were credited as the biggest single reason for the increase.
“The increases in numbers of travelers are largely due to the Santa Monica Convention and Visitors Bureau working to bring in people from abroad,” said William Worcester, general manager of the Miramar Sheraton Hotel, where Clinton has stayed some 11 times during his presidency.
In 1994, 73 percent of all visitors were foreigners up from 47 percent in 1989, according to the latest available figures from the bureau. Also during that period, the numbers of visitors had increased by 54 percent to 3.11 million.
When Beverly Moore became the visitors bureau’s executive director a decade ago, there were few hotels and Santa Monica was just another beach city. But she came armed with three years of experience as deputy director of the state’s Office of Tourism and five years with the U.S. Travel and Tourism Administratrion.
“That experience gave me a big picture outlook to apply to the community,” said Moore.
Knowing that the highest spending, longest staying visitors are foreign tourists, Moore and her staff embarked on a campaign to bring them in.
Not only did Santa Monica advertisements begin to appear regularly in places like the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan, but the bureau did things like establish free trips and other goodies for travel agents in those countries to sell Santa Monica packages to tourists.
“Bringing in foreign visitors is not like turning on a faucet,” Moore said. “It takes a lot of aggressive relationship building with tour operators to build up a base of visitors.”
Attracting group tours was the first step in building that base, she said, and the second was bringing in the individual visitors. This involved setting up promotions like a U.K. radio campaign for a trip giveaway, and paying for travel journalists from other countries to visit the city.
“Having a third party write about the city is cheaper and gets better results than regular advertising,” she said.
The city, which spends $900,000 a year promoting itself, has also sought to exploit traditional traveling periods of other countries. For example, Moore said, Japanese usually travel in the fall and spring while Europeans vacation in the summer and business travel is heaviest from November through March.
“Keeping track of these things has kept our stream of visitors quite steady,” she said.
Moore said the bureau also markets itself to meeting planners at companies and to convention planning companies.
The increases in visitor spending have been a boon for city coffers in that since 1985, bed tax revenues have increased more than 400 percent to about $13 million annually.
The figure reflects the opening of new hotels such as Loew’s Santa Monica Beach Hotel, opened in 1989, and Shutters on the Beach Hotel, opened in 1994, plus an increase in bed tax rates.
Baltin, the PKF consultant, said the city’s tourist industry growth is already outstripping the supply of accommodations.
“There is a chronic shortage of hotel rooms in Santa Monica,” he said. “With occupancy rates as they are and as there is not much planned for construction, it will be very difficult for the supply of hotels to meet demand.”
Groundbreaking on a 175-room hotel next to Loew’s is expected in a few weeks. Owned by the Fort Mitchell, Ky.-based Columbia Sussex Corp., the project is a few bureaucratic hurdles away from final approval, said Santa Monica city planner David Martin.
The only other major tourist-related project Martin knew of was the proposed purchase and renovation of the beach front Pritikin Longevity Center by the owners of the Shutters Hotel. However, that project would bring few if any new hotel rooms to Santa Monica.
