United States
USTA: Study Shows Gulf Coast Travel Marketing Needed
By Leo Jakobson
Photo by Visit St. Petersburg/Clearwater
July 23, 2010
The U.S. Travel Association announced yesterday that a
study it commissioned found that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is likely to cost the region $22.7 billion in lost travel and tourism revenue over three years.
The study was based on an analysis of 25 recent manmade and natural disasters, ranging from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and incidents of terrorism to Hurricane Katrina and the 2003 SARS/avian flu outbreak in Asia, by Oxford Economics, the Washington, DC, research firm that produced the landmark study of the
ROI of Business Travel for the USTA last year in an effort to combat the post-AIG anti-meetings and incentive travel bias. The firm’s BP oil spill study predicts that a $500 million investment now in a marketing campaign to correct misperceptions—few, if any, beaches are actually polluted with oil—could reduce that impact by $7.5 billion.
It’s increasingly clear that the meetings and incentives business is part of that impact. By early June, the Knowland Group, a meetings industry research and marketing firm, found that 60 percent of the 50 Gulf Coast hotels it surveyed
reported outright cancellations of group business, not just decreased bookings. That’s nearly double the cancellations at the beginning of May.
“History and current trends indicate a potential $22.7 billion economic loss to the travel economies of the Gulf Coast states over the next three years,” said Adam Sacks, managing director of New York-based
Oxford Economics, in a statement. “One of the most cost-effective ways to mitigate these damages is to immediately fund strategic marketing to counter misperceptions and encourage travel to the region.”
That’s a technique Gulf Coast convention and visitor’s bureaus (CVBs) and hoteliers have already been trying on a smaller and less coordinated scale. “We’re being as proactive as possible to educate our planners and visitors that we’re open for business and unaffected by the spill,” David Downing, deputy director of the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention and Visitors Bureau,
told Incentive in May. “We’re using social media to get the message out. We linked the live webcam from the beach to our Web site when we realized there could be a perception problem. There’s nothing like seeing people on the beach. A picture says a thousand words.”
One picture the Gulf Coast travel and tourism industry hopes will say more than a thousand words about their beaches is the image of President Barack Obama and his family vacationing on them. Yesterday, the White House announced that the First Family plans to take some R&R on a Florida beach the weekend of Aug. 14. Which beach it is has not yet been announced. While both the President and First Lady Michelle Obama have visited the region repeatedly, they have been under growing pressure to vacation there.