Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306110011
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: John Levin
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Roanoke Valley and adjacent territory may be smart to intensify efforts to lure and entertain visitors. Their money can help offset declines and lost jobs in manufacturing and other sectors. Tourism is an industry that provides large numbers of entry-level jobs for new generations of workers. Tourist attractions generally do not pollute. And local residents often enjoy using facilities created to lure visitors.
Add two new factors that the travel industry says guarantee its bright future:
New lifestyle research suggests more Americans see leisure travel as a necessity than a luxury, according to Mark Brown, research manager for the Virginia Tourism Office. Stressful workplaces, more common in the 1990s, create the need for families to take shorter trips and to travel more often. It also means that issues that formerly would delay or cancel a family vacation - bad weather, economic recession, safety concerns - are less of a deterrent to short trips.
The data show that today nearly 75 percent of Americans travel regularly, compared to estimates of about 40 percent just 20 years ago.
The baby boom generation - nearly 74 million people born between 1945 and 1964 - is moving into prime years for leisure travel. "They're reaching the age - 40 - is moving into prime years for leisure travel. "They're reaching the age - 40 to 60 - when people have the highest tendency to travel," said Randall Smith, whose Smith Travel Research in Gallatin, Tenn., provides data for the nation's hotel industry.
"We've got record numbers of people moving into those age groups, and they will travel," he said.
Projections by Smith and economists in Virginia are for 4 percent to 5 percent annual increases in travel spending every year this decade. That growth rate, in after-inflation real dollars, is likely to outpace that of most other segments of the economy, regardless of what happens in those other segments, Smith said.
The downside for the Roanoke region is that this news probably has already reached every other town that thinks it can coax money from strangers. "The question," said Smith, "is whether there's enough [business] to go around."
From Las Vegas - with 12,000 new hotel rooms just this year - to Branson - a southwest Missouri town of 2,500 that's emerged as a country music mecca - "communities know there are definitely reasons to hitch [their] wagons to tourism," Smith said. "You've got to find something unique and establish in the mind of the public that it's something they want to see.
"Roanoke, the best I can remember, is a town with an interstate beside it," he said.
Which suggests the region has some image building to do.
Marketing to tourists, like selling most consumer goods, is a matter of finding a specialized niche. Adventure travel, eco-tourism, archaeology, hiking and exploring old coal mines are suggested vacation themes for Western Virginia from Roy Pearson, director of the College of William and Mary's Bureau of Business Research.
He noted that Memphis is expected to be a hot spot this summer, simply because it landed the only U.S. showing of an exhibit about Napoleon.
But even Virginia, rich in historic sites and other traditional tourist lures, is struggling to maintain its piece of the business. Virginia's $8.6 billion take from travelers accounted for 2.7 percent of U.S. travel expenditures last year. That's down from the 2.9 percent peak in 1989.
The key reason, Brown said, is that Virginia and its localities are not able or willing to spend enough on advertising and promotion to compete with the newer and larger attractions.
Virginia will spend $9.95 million this year on tourism promotion, and only five of its attractions or localities -- Busch Gardens, Colonial Williamsburg, Kings Dominion, Luray Caverns and the city of Virginia Beach -- make significant efforts to draw tourists from outside the state, he said.
Even the state's big spender -- Virginia Beach -- sees its $4 million annual promotion budget dwarfed by the $250 million advertising attack by the Walt Disney Co.'s Florida attractions. Compare those numbers to the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau's ad budget of less than $100,000.
Only recently has the Beach learned that it no longer can be a passive player. That city's new tourism growth investment fund is a $94 million capital plan for new and renovated tourism-related facilities. Fueled by taxes on lodging, meals and other travel-related spending, Virginia Beach anticipates spending $10 million a year on its facilities and image.
"It's an ongoing fund, because you have to continually update and look fresh," said James Ricketts, the city's director of convention and visitor development.
"There's an assumption that tourism is a free industry, that people will come to spend their money," Ricketts said. "But it's expensive to get into and to maintain."
by CNB