SAN DIEGO — Travel is bouncing back and so too are the millions of dollars that local tourism officials plan to spend this year on luring visitors to San Diego over rival vacation spots across the U.S.
Thanks to a rebound in leisure travel that is now exceeding prepandemic levels, San Diego will have $38 million to spend exclusively on tourism promotion — from TV and online advertising to helping fund popular events like the thunder boat races and the San Diego Bay Wine & Food Festival that draw out-of-towners. That’s up about $10 million from just a year earlier, although still short of the $48 million allocated in fiscal year 2019-2020.
The single biggest recipient of this year’s money, which comes from a 2% surcharge on hotel room stays in San Diego, is the San Diego Tourism Authority. Of the nearly $35 million it is getting for the current fiscal year, more than half — $19.5 million — will be spent on promotional ads, both in Western cities and in two new markets, Denver and Dallas.
While the media budget this year isn’t back to the prepandemic peak of $28 million, it’s considerably more than the $14 million the bureau had to spend just two years ago, said Chief Operating Officer Kerri Kapich.
“Everything is moving in the right direction, and now we will have more money to invest so we can keep rebuilding the recovery,” she said. “A big part of why we’ve done very well in leisure is because we’ve been able to market San Diego through the pandemic and now the endemic stage.
San Diego is poised to enjoy one of its biggest tourism months all year with the return this month of two of its largest conventions — ESRI’s global mapping conference, beginning Monday, followed by Comic-Con, starting July 20. Also this month is San Diego LGBTQ Pride, which tends to draw out-of-town visitors as well.
Now with the extra money it has for promotion, San Diego will be able to step up marketing the rest of the year, reaching out to its closer neighbors like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and Las Vegas, as well as to more distant locations like Dallas and Denver that are more populous and also a relatively short plane flight away, Kapich said.
With people now back on the road and crowding airports as they break free of their COVID-19 bubbles, she pointed out that competition for tourist dollars is keener than ever. San Diego still has wide appeal, and its outdoor spaces make it a natural for those weary of gathering indoors, but the reality is, other destinations still beckon, Kapich said.
“Hawaii, Europe, they’ve reopened,” she added. “People may say, we’ve been to San Diego three times over the last 2 1/2 years so let’s go see a national park, which is why we have to go beyond California and Arizona, to keep that message out there.”
Overseeing the distribution of the marketing money is the hotelier-run Tourism Marketing District, formed in 2008 to ensure that a steady stream of revenue would be available to promote San Diego as a tourist destination. Since then, similar destination marketing districts have been established in cities across the U.S.
The funding vehicle became especially crucial during the pandemic when it still remained important to keep San Diego on people’s radar as a getaway destination, said TMD Executive Director Colleen Anderson, Because revenue from the 2% marketing surcharge continues to grow, the TMD this year was able to provide 19 smaller organizations with a total of $2.7 million in funding to help support events designed to draw overnight visitors to San Diego. A number of them are newer events hoping to get a toehold in San Diego for years to come.
Among the new recipients are:
— The Old Town Lucha Libre Festival, sponsored by the Old Town Chamber of Commerce, that will feature semi-professional Luchador wrestling.
— The Zero Emissions Alliance, which plans to hold a summit and expo after Labor Day weekend that is expected to draw officials from government agencies, municipalities, utilities and startups focused on clean energy and transportation.
— Legit Rare’s All-American Championship and Showcase, a high school football event featuring the top 100 players in the country. Following the annual Holiday Bowl in December, it will include exhibition games while also providing college coaches with recruitment opportunities.
— Sports San Diego, which is trying to bring new sporting events to San Diego, got funding assistance for the upcoming Donate Life Transplant Games of America, which honors organ donors and raises awareness of organ donation. It is supposed to draw 37 teams from across the country, plus three international teams.
While San Diego is forecast to see continued growth in leisure travel, corporate and meeting-related travel is not expected to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024, forecasters say.
Because leisure demand is high, it’s helping make up for lagging business travel. Between January and May of this year, the number of hotel room nights sold was 38 percent higher than the same period last year, said Tourism Authority Research Director Nathan Kelley. But when compared to that same period in 2019, the level of bookings is 5% less.
And a looming recession remains a wild card, Kelley acknowledges.
“On the one hand, high vaccination rates and stricter safety protocols could lure more risk-averse businesses to hold meetings and events in San Diego,” Kelley wrote in a report produced by the TMD. “On the other, the risk of the U.S. sliding into recession (is) slightly more elevated as the Federal Reserve moves to normalize monetary policy this year and next.”
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