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 Tough Times for Tourism Marketers
State tourism offices are increasingly challenged to promote their destinations
By Marshall Krantz
The past few years have been tough for state tourism offices as many toil under heavy budget cuts that state governments enacted to cope with a poor economy.
 The most recent and extreme example: Washington state shut down its tourism office at the end of June even though tourism is the state's fourth-largest industry. That action gave Washington the dubious distinction of being the only state without a government-supported, statewide destination marketing organization.
Continuing Struggle
A new report from the U.S. Travel Association, released in August, provides a glimmer of hope that the funding crisis has hit bottom. But the report, an annual survey of state tourism office budgets, also suggests that many state tourism offices continue to struggle.
For fiscal year 2010-2011, the aggregated budgets of state tourism offices in the United States climbed 2.3 percent over the previous fiscal year, to just over $677 million, according to the U.S. Travel report. The increase in funding, while encouraging, means that aggregated budgets were more than 16 percent below the high of almost $812 million in fiscal 2007-2008. Budget totals for fiscal 2009-2010 represented a five-year low in expenditures for state tourism offices.
Nan Marchand, who works with state tourism offices as senior director of National Council relations for U.S. Travel, calls the report "very positive compared to last year. Budgets are stabilizing now, so this is very good news directionally."
At the same time, however, the report also points out that "the increase masks widely divergent changes among the states between the two fiscal years, with just as many states experiencing significant declines as those with substantial increases." Read More...
Corporation for Travel Promotion
Despite the funding problems that many destination marketing organizations face, the U.S. has finally joined most of the developed world in getting its first national tourism office.
Created by federal law last year, the nonprofit Corporation for Travel Promotion (CTP) hired its first chief executive in May and is expected to fill other key executive positions by the end of August. It plans to unveil its initial marketing campaign, including a brand for the United States as a travel destination, this November at the World Travel Market in London.
Operating under the auspices of the Department of Commerce, the CTC is expected to reverse the decline in America's share of the international travel market.
Since 2000, the global travel market has grown by more than 60 million travelers, but 2.4 million fewer international travelers visited the United States in 2009 than in 2000, costing the U.S. economy an estimated 441,000 jobs over that period and $509 billion in total spending, according to research conducted for the U.S. Travel Association by Oxford Economics.
"Every sector of the economy will benefit in the form of more heads in beds, more passengers on planes and trains, more international attendees at meetings and more customers at local businesses across the country," CTC Chief Executive Jim Evans says of his organization's anticipated marketing efforts. Read More...
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