Tony Smithers/For the Times-Standard
Posted: 05/17/2009 01:30:21 AM PDT
The hospitality industry has not been immune to the economic downturn. When people are not sure about their jobs, and when their retirement portfolios have lost a third of their value, it’s understandable if they curtail their travel spending. To top it off, meeting and conference travel has tanked in the wake of the AIG scandal. No one wants to be accused of taking a junket, even when there are legitimate reasons for business people to meet.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, especially for travel and tourism on the North Coast. In fact, the economy and the changes in people’s travel habits may play into our hands, as they have done before. Far from being a cause for alarm, current conditions present us with a set of exciting opportunities to promote our destination and build our tourism industry this year and into the future.
The Redwood Curtain
The insulating effect we call the Redwood Curtain, though often cursed, may be shielding us from the worst of the recession. Since last fall, North Coast hotel occupancy and room rates have indeed been down from the previous year, but our rate of decrease is nearly the lowest in California. In fact, on October’s Smith Travel Report the North Coast was the only California region that did not have a negative occupancy number. In the first two months of this year, California’s occupancy rates were down by 13.5 percent but on the North Coast we were off by just 6.6 percent. Only the Central Coast region around San Luis Obispo fared better, at -3.9 percent.
Several factors seem to be involved in our relative stability. For one, here behind the Redwood Curtain we just don’t have that much meeting and conference business so we are less impacted by the tightening of corporate travel. We also have fewer international visitors than many other California destinations, and the markets that we actively pursue through our regional partnerships — the United Kingdom and Germany — are still among the strongest sources of international visitors to California.
But eclipsing these factors in importance is our position relative to our core market of Northern California residents: safe, close, familiar and cheap. With over two-thirds of our visitors living within a six-hour drive, it is how these customers behave that really determines our destination’s destiny. Fortunately, history shows that when the going gets tough, the tough get in the car and go north. We saw this after the dot com bust, after 9/11, SARS and other events. People didn’t stop traveling; they just changed their travel habits. Flying to Cancun, Paris or Waikiki was out — driving to wine country or the redwoods was in.
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