Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9407150003
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Stories by JEFF DEBELL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
FROM where Martha Mackey sits, tourists are the perfect economic machines.
``They come, they leave their money, they go,'' she said.
Mackey is executive director of the Roanoke Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau, which is charged with luring tourists to the valley in the greatest numbers possible.
It does so largely by advertising in regional and national media, pursuing convention business and courting specialty markets like bus tour operators. It also operates the visitors information center in downtown Roanoke, which had more than 39,000 visitors last year.
That number could be higher, proponents say, if the valley realized the economic development potential of tourism and seriously set out to get a piece of the action.
Others have a less positive view of the industry.
Michal Smith presents the worst-case scenario in ``Behind the Glitter,'' her 1989 study of tourism in rural southeastern communities including Tennessee's Sevier County, the home of Dollywood:
``[T]he mainstay of tourism economies becomes low-wage, female dominated, marginal jobs on a road to nowhere," she wrote. "[A] successful tourist attraction more often than not places serious stress on local infrastructure while it degrades the environment and local culture, gradually diminishing the power of the attraction that first lured visitors to the community.''
Others say environmental pitfalls can be avoided with planning. The co-founder of Citizens for Quality Development in Asheville, N.C., believes tourism encourages responsible stewardship of the environment.
``If you don't take care of it, people won't come to see it,'' Carolyn Wallace said. ``I like tourism. One of the ways growth happens is that people come to see your city and they like it.''
It's hard to see tourism as a threat to the Roanoke Valley, where the industry is relatively new. No one suggests that tourism should or could dominate the valley economy - only that it can play a greater role in the overall economic development mix.
``There is an awful lot to sell here, but we have to have the funds and the partnership to do it,'' said hotel executive Gerald Carter, president of the Convention & Visitors Bureau.
He and others believe the bureau needs at least $1 million per year to promote the valley and its attractions: the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains with their trails, campgrounds and streams; cultural attractions such as Center in the Square and the Harrison Museum of African American Culture; the fishing and rafting along the New River; farmers markets in Salem and Roanoke; the burgeoning antiques scene in Salem; golf courses; Mountain Lake; Natural Bridge; and the soon-to-open Explore Park in Roanoke County.
``As Explore grows it's going to be a big, big attraction,'' Carter said. ``It has the potential of being the destination attraction of the magnitude we need.''
Carter's allusion is to the claim, made by skeptics, that Roanoke-area tourism is fatally handicapped by the lack of a major destination attraction like Dollywood, Asheville's lavish Biltmore Estate or - at the least - a nest of brand-name retail outlets.
Not a problem, Mackey said.
``The mountains are a destination. In essence, what we have is a hub and spoke mechanism," she said. "Go out, see the attractions, come back and spend the night.''
``People are looking for multiple experiences,'' said Richard E. Sorensen, dean of the College of Business at Virginia Tech and an authority on tourism trends.
In Asheville, which has had an active tourist industry for more than a century, the Convention and Visitors Bureau voluntarily promotes outlying attractions in addition to those in Asheville and Buncombe County.
The hub strategy can work even without the advantage of a Biltmore Estate, bureau executive director Carolyn Ketchum said. For Roanoke, it would be a matter of taking inventory of tourism assets and selling them on a regional basis.
``It can be done,'' said Jim Littlefield, a professor of marketing at Virginia Tech. ``We need to make it a destination.''
And there should be no distinction between the Roanoke and New River valleys, he said.
``I see these as one valley," he said. "They have made a serious mistake for years in separating them.''
Though the Roanoke Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau's information center has brochures for New River Valley attractions, the bureau is not charged with promoting that area. That's the responsibility of the Christiansburg-Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce, which responds to inquiries, but has no marketing budget.
Among other possibilities, Littlefield suggests a ``festival tour'' taking travelers from one community festival to another in succession.
``We've got to get together and promote the whole I-81 corridor,'' he said. ``That's the bottom line.''
In a 1992 study by Tech, Canadian vacationers were found to be heavy users of Interstate 81. Their frequent destination: the golfing mecca of Myrtle Beach, S.C. Why not try to snag them for a day or two of golfing in Roanoke-area courses? Sorensen asks.
No one can say exactly how many tourists visit the Roanoke Valley. But there are a number of indicators - many measured in dollars - of the extent of the industry:
The visitor information center reported more than 39,000 visitors in 1993.
An estimated 822,670 people rented hotel and motel rooms in the Roanoke market last year, according to Smith Travel Research, a national firm serving the travel industry. The occupancy rate was 64.6 percent, just under the national average of 66 percent.
Travelers spent at least $241 million in the valley last year, according to the State Division of Tourism.
Their spending generated more than $10 million in local revenue through hospitality taxes on lodging, meals, and tickets to entertainment events, according to local governments, plus untold other dollars in gasoline and sales taxes.
An estimated 4,500 people in the valley work in hotels and restaurants or have other jobs related to tourism.
They collectively earn $57 million per year and pay more than $5.5 million in local taxes, the tourism division reports.
It's almost like free money, Mackey says, because tourists normally make relatively few demands on the local infrastructure. They use the same roads, utilities and police protection as everyone else, and no one has to educate their children or give them food stamps.
``I think that tourism is a godsend,'' said Littlefield, the Tech marketing professor. ``I think with all my being that tourism is extremely important for some areas, this being one of them. The reason is, we have no alternative.''
That is so, he said, because traditional industrial development can no longer be counted on to produce large numbers of new jobs. Instead, manufacturing jobs have been declining in number. The so-called ``service economy'' is on the ascendency, and tourism is in the thick of it.
Now ranked third behind food and auto sales as a generator of spending nationally, tourism will be No. 1 by the year 2000, according to the U.S. Travel Data Center in Washington. With 6 million employees, tourism ranks behind only health care as an employer.
Therein lies perhaps the principal economic benefit of tourism, said. Sorensen, the Tech business dean:
``It involves jobs, usually a goodly number of jobs. It's one of the big growth areas of our economy.''
U.S. Labor Department statistics bear him out. Tourism jobs are among the fastest-growing in the land. They include jobs in retail sales, food preparation and service, housekeeping, reception and counter work, and positions for cashiers and travel agents.
Proponents say tourism supports many small businesses and creates spinoff jobs in fields like construction and advertising.
Unfortunately, many of the jobs in tourism are among the country's lowest-paying. That's probably the principal rap against the industry: Though it generates many jobs, most of them are less than first-rate.
They don't pay well.
They're deficient in fringe benefits.
They're often part-time or seasonal.
``You're talking $6.60 without benefits, as opposed to $12 with benefits" for manufacturing, said economics professor Edwin T. Dickens of the University of North Carolina at Asheville. ``You're not creating a professional work force [with tourism]. It's better to get one manufacturing job than three tourism jobs.''
Radford University economist Adrienne Birecree is cautious, too.
``My biggest concern is the quality of jobs,'' she said. ``Even the multiplier effect tends to produce low-paying jobs.''
Though aware of tourism's reputation for making inferior jobs, proponents aren't particularly fazed by it. The untrained need jobs, too, they say, and a tourism job is better than no job or being on welfare.
They point out that not all tourism jobs are low-paying. There are executive and management jobs as well as janitorial positions and jobs selling trinkets or taking tickets to the local waterslide.
The U.S. Travel Data Center reports there are 650,000 executive positions in the U.S. travel and tourism industry and says employment in those positions is expected to grow faster than employment in the overall economy in the next decade.
The average hotel general manager makes between $37,000 and $83,000 per year, the data center says.
When all jobs are taken into account, said Pat McMahon of the Virginia Tourism Division, the average hourly wage for tourism in the state is $9.50.
Tourism is touted as clean, too, because it doesn't foul air or water with toxic emissions, unlike some of the factories that are the targets of more conventional economic development efforts.
Others counter that exhaust emissions from traffic in high-tourist areas cause harmful acid rain and that tourism is not so clean after all. A liberal definition of ``pollution'' might also encompass traffic congestion and the visual blight of tourist-trap commercialism: fast-food joints; cheap-souvenir stands; go-cart tracks and the like.
by CNB