ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9608020074
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
PEOPLE come from hundreds, maybe even thousands of miles away to see the Roanoke Valley, and sometimes their visit begins with a handshake or a hello from Ann Meyer.
She is Explore Park's site manager and chief of special events. Tooling around in a golf cart or on foot through the re-created frontier village, she checks the stage before the curtain rises.
Greeting and gauging the mood of visitors is part of her job, too. She said she gets the sense that tourism is more than just a word on the lips of economic development officials. It's her livelihood and an industry, and it is growing.
"We have people all the time, they're here already, they ask about other things around the area to see. They ask about the zoo, the [City] Market," Meyer said.
"We get international visitors quite often. We get quite a few visitors who come in here and can't speak a word of English but still seem to enjoy the park. We get quite a few off the Blue Ridge Parkway."
Roanoke Valley tourism was a $225 million industry in 1994, the latest available measure. That's the state's best estimate of what vacationing families, conventioneers and honeymooners spent at restaurants, hotels, shops, gas stations and attractions. These businesses, key elements of what's known as the hospitality industry, employed 4,200 people to serve tourists and enabled local governments to reap nearly $12 million annually in added taxes that year.
It's good, clean industry, economists will tell you. Tourists perk up a community's spirit and don't demand a lot of services but often spend lavishly. Most every crossroads in America hangs a welcome sign tourists, but in the Roanoke Valley, a special-purpose agency has brought in tourists for more than 10 years.
That agency is feeling heat, as some question its effectiveness in the difficult business of tourism promotion. Some say that's not all bad, that this can be a time for new leadership and new ideas aimed at bumping up the number of tourists the valley serves.
But behind the doors of the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau, these are tough times, as the agency faces perhaps the greatest challenges of its existence.
Martha Mackey is quitting as executive director after criticism from a board member and an ill-defined group of hotel managers.
Carey Harveycutter, who runs Salem's sports stadiums and civic center and sits on the bureau's board, said the agency couldn't be trusted to report its performance honestly and spread business evenly among valley communities and their hotels. He said Mackey needed to stabilize a convention sales department plagued by turnover.
Salem leaders, hearing these concerns and wanting their own visitors bureau anyway, slashed the city's annual grant to the bureau operating budget from $25,000 to $1,000. It was a slap. The bureau had asked for $100,000.
Earlier, the Roanoke Airport Marriott hotel, a founding member of the bureau, reduced its support, saying $8,000 of its usual $10,500 gift could be better spent on in-house sales efforts.
Roanoke Mayor David Bowers, saying he backed Mackey, has called for an investigation to justify Roanoke's continuing contribution of $500,000 a year, or 72 percent of the agency's $694,000 budget. The investigative report is to be completed in August or September.
The latest development came last week, when Harveycutter retracted an aspect of his criticism - that the bureau padded a 1994-1995 count of convention attendees. He acted after Mackey justified her claims to him. He apologized to her.
Mackey, however, won't stay. She denies fudging numbers. She said accusations that the bureau did that were emotionally wrenching and compromised her leadership.
"It ruined my peace," she said in an interview. Her tears made that evident.
She is going to start a home business retailing consumer goods and try to write children's books. Her last day at the bureau was July 26 and she will act as a consultant to the bureau until Oct. 29 at the latest. By then, the bureau's leaders hope to hire her replacement.
Though disappointed that Mackey is leaving, Bowers said he still thinks something good may come out of the stir. It has made people talk about the bureau and think about tourism.
"Hopefully, the controversy will help to ferment some new ideas and some discussion and a positive outcome," said Bowers, who has been a proponent of developing visitor attractions in the city. People he won't identify already are suggesting ways to restructure the organization or its operations, or both, the mayor said.
The Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce started the bureau in the early 1980s. Bowers believes Roanoke was just awakening to the notion that a community could court tourists. In a campaign speech in 1984, he told listeners he supported launching efforts to steer travelers here. "There were snickers in the crowd," he said. "People take it seriously now."
That same year, the bureau broke from the chamber, drawing its own budget from the city of Roanoke and local hotels, including the Marriott. It later obtained tax-exempt status and moved to its offices at 114 Market St., where its visitors bureau is open each day.
In 1987 Mackey joined the fledgling organization ... the first convention sales person at what was then a fledgling organization. She was promoted to executive director in 1989 and went on to be its longest-running chief administrator.
A native of the area near Winston-Salem, N.C., she grew up mostly in Roanoke. After attending Brevard College in North Carolina, she began her career as sales manager of a Sheraton hotel in Spokane, Wash. She returned East, working less than a year as a wholesale food dealer in Virginia Beach and then in marketing for what is now the Quality Inn Roanoke-Salem on Virginia 311.
At her resignation last month, the 42-year-old Mackey was earning $63,000 a year.
"She started from scratch with just what was an idea," said Granger Macfarlane, a board member who owns Eastern Motor Inns Inc., a Roanoke-based hotel company. "She ... developed, I thought, a very good advocacy public organization."
Many think the the bureau's main function is to run the City Market visitors center, where smiling docents hand out free maps and directions and the line is short to use a clean restroom. There's no denying it is a hub of activity. One in 10 people who come there is from a foreign country.
But the bureau does much that the public doesn't see. It places advertising in travel-related publications such as Southern Living and, as anyone who has traveled Interstate 81 recently knows, buys space on billboard. It hosts expense-paid visits by travel writers and meeting planners, produces and distributes guides and brochures and gives something akin to concierge training to hospitality workers, including hotels' front desk clerks.
In addition, the 11-employee bureau solicits businesses and organizations to hold conventions and take tours in the valley. At the point of booking a convention, the bureau's work is far from over. The bureau will handle advance arrangements for out-of-town guests, reserving their choice of rooms. When guests arrive, the bureau may issue a press release, provide name tags, run shuttle buses, arrange a reception and wine and dine dignitaries. The visiting group pays nothing to the bureau for its services.
In summary, the bureau tries to send folks away with a reason to come back. Fanny packs stuffed with local goods, lapel pins and even stamped postcards with a local scene serve as gifts and subtle reminders.
In 1993, a 237 percent boost in funding allowed the bureau to hire more staff. The money came from an increase in hotel and cigarette taxes in Roanoke, Mackey said. The budget has hovered above $600,000 for four consecutive fiscal years, including the one that began July 1.
But the money still may not be enough.
Bowers said the valley should spend more on tourism. He said he doubted he could convince city leaders to contribute more to the agency, however, because the city already is the lead benefactor.
Roanoke County, with about 43 percent of Roanoke's tourism revenue, appears unlikely to give the bureau dramatically more over its annual grant of $107,500, at least in the near future. Bob Johnson, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, said he "can't quarrel with their success."
But the county is paying what it can and has spent large sums of money on Explore Park and in protection of the Blue Ridge Parkway. He called the latter the area's leading tourist attraction.
According to Mackey, the Roanoke Valley competes for tourists with at least six communities, all of which have much larger advertising and marketing war chests. While the Roanoke Valley tourism bureau spends about $650,000 yearly, Virginia Beach spends $7.5 million; Louisville, Ky. $4 million; Norfolk more than $4 million; Asheville, N.C. $2.4 million; Richmond $2, million; and Greensboro $1.1 million.
Virginia convention and visitors bureaus generally have only $1 to spend for every $4 or $5 available to tourism promotion organizations of comparable size in other states, such as North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and possibly Tennessee, said Martha Steger, spokeswoman for the Virginia Tourism Corp., formerly the state Division of Tourism.
"There's an old saying that you may not spend as much as the next person but you can spend smarter," Steger said. "That's not always true" Funding determines to a large extent what a convention and visitors bureau can accomplish. She urges communities to spend as much as they can afford, because tourism advocates compete globally for the business of conventioneers and vacationing families.
"When you see Virginia ads running in New York, chances are Ireland is running ads on the same [cable TV] station," Steger said. Virginia tourism was a $9.48 billion industry, supports 162,500 jobs in 1994 and generates state and local tax revenue $657 million, she said.
The Roanoke Valley, to its credit, has spent more in recent years, Steger said. "Roanoke has stepped up to the plate," she said. Last year, the state gave the bureau its highest honor, an accreditation that signifies the bureau is a sophisticated marketer and treats tourists right when they get here.
As the local bureau received more money, tourism and promotional efforts generally increased, according to figures from Mackey. There was a slight drop, however, in the number of people stopping by the visitors center, the closest thing to an actual count of tourists available locally.
As one measure of its performance, the bureau counts people who attend conventions that it helped bring to the valley. That figure rose from 41,575 to 68,620, or by 64 percent, between the 1993-94 fiscal year and 1994-95, according to bureau data.
The figure dropped to 57,965 during the year that ended June 30, but Mackey blames that on her inability to maintain a steady convention sales force. Several employees left last fiscal year, leaving just one sales person, and she could not find the right people to replace them, she said.
Nobody knows precisely how much tourists spend in the valley. But Mackey estimated that the typical overnight traveler spends $112 daily. A Virginia Tech study said most travelers spend two or three days and about $358 per person during the whole visit.
As the bureau looks to its future, its leaders hope to develop better statistics. That's just one of many issues that will appear on upcoming meeting agendas of the board of directors. With Mackey going, the whole operation is under review. Beth Poff, newly seated as board president and director of Mill Mountain Zoo, is talking about a publicity campaign to raise citizen support by advertising more of what the bureau does.
Mackey is leaving with a sense that things will go forward, as recent events have not halted progress. Her organization three years ago began waiting for a billboard to become available to advertise the area to traffic on Interstate 81, where it is possible to drive past without getting much of a look at the valley. This year, billboards became available near Ironto and Troutville. The bureau put down $25,000, a whopping one-third of its advertising budget.
The new signs featuring the night skyline have been posted - just in time to be seen by travelers returning from the Olympic Games in Atlanta.
LENGTH: Long : 217 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ERIC BRADY STAFF Martha Mackey has resigned asby CNBexecutive director of the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors
Bureau amid criticism about her management of the agency. Mackey,
who joined the bureau in 1987, said the controversy has "ruined my
peace." color
2. Visitors to the bureau in the Marketplace Center can get
information about the Roanoke Valley. One in every 10 visitors is
from a foreign country. color.
3. chart and graph - The Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors
Bureau at a glance color STAFF KEYWORDS: PROFILE MGR