A truck ("a snow globe on wheels") and its ground crew are selling Seattle as a shopping destination for the holidays in Vancouver, BC, Spokane and Portland. Photo courtesy Seattle Convention & Visitors Bureau.
This week on Cornichon: a multi-part series on Washington's misunderstood tourism industry, and the ill-considered opposition to state funding of tourism promotion.
In the coming year, the Seattle Convention & Visitor Bureau expects to spend 40 percent of its admittedly modest budget for tourism promotion online. Along with the Port of Seattle, the Visitor Bureau will actually double its spending to bring tour operators and journalists here "to see for themselves." For its part, the Port maintains marketing offices in Beijing, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt and Paris to tell the Seattle story. One out of every five visitors to Washington these days flies into SeaTac from outside the United States, and the foreign visitors are responsible for a third of all tourism revenues. (Emirates will begin nonstop flights to and from Dubai in March, 2012.) All told, tourism is a $15 billion dollar industry in Washington, the fourth largest sector of the state's economy, according to Tom Norwalk, president of the SCVB.
So how did it come to pass that Washington's legislature voted, in the last session, to eliminate all state funding for tourism promotion? With a paltry, $2 million budget, Washington's funding was already 48th out of the 50 states. "It's somewhat embarrassing," Norwalk says.
But it's far from the first time that cost-cutters have taken the ax to tourism's Golden Goose. They did it in Colorado some years ago; Colorado's tourism revenues plummeted 30 percent. You'd think state legislatures would learn. Wrong.
Tomorrow: what happened in Texas.
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