In a bid to jump-start tourism to Los Angeles as the Covid pandemic appears to be receding, Mayor Eric Garcetti last week signed an executive order creating a tourism cabinet to spearhead efforts to make the city more attractive to tourists.
The new cabinet will consist of various city department heads and will be led by Doane Liu, executive director of the city’s tourism department.
“Los Angeles is a global destination, and if we want our economy to fully recover from the pandemic, we need to get this industry back on its feet,” Garcetti said at the executive order signing. “Tourism and hospitality were hit hard over the last two years, and as we continue to safely welcome more people from across the country and world to Los Angeles, we need to make sure Angelenos benefit from that economic growth.”
Indeed, in 2020, the year the pandemic hit, the number of tourists arriving in L.A. plunged nearly 50% to 26.9. million, rebounding somewhat in 2021 to about 40 million, according to figures supplied by the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board.
The drop in international tourists was even more dramatic, plunging to less than 2 million in 2020 from 7.4 million in 2019; last year that rebounded somewhat to just under 3 million, according to figures from the board.
These figures will be top of mind as the new tourism cabinet looks to strengthen L.A.’s tourism infrastructure, expanding accommodations such as hotels and short-term rental opportunities, and upgrading activity centers for tourists.
As part of this effort, the cabinet will look to implement a series of recommendations laid out in the city’s tourism master plan, which was released in April 2020 at the height of the pandemic lockdown. Among the recommendations: expediting expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center, upgrading the Hollywood Walk of Fame, expediting expansion of existing hotels and building of new ones and improving wayfinding for tourists.
One thing the new tourism cabinet will not do is implement marketing campaigns to attract additional tourists. That will remain the domain of the nonprofit Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board, known as Los Angeles Tourism.
Indeed, the board sees Garcetti’s new tourism cabinet as complementary to its own effort to market the region to tourists.
“As the official, nonprofit tourism promotion organization for the city of Los Angeles, we are appreciative of Mayor Garcetti’s long-standing support for the importance of tourism to our local economy,” said Los Angeles Tourism’s Chief Executive Adam Burke. “Los Angeles Tourism is grateful for the city’s vision in establishing the newly created Tourism Cabinet to address those key issues that directly impact the visitor experience.”
