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Tourism ad dollars will flow again
By MARK ALBRIGHT, Times Staff Writer
The war in Iraq has not hurt tourism as much as many feared, so Pinellas County tourist industry marketers are reactivating their advertising and planning to boost their ad spending by a third this spring. If they get the County Commission's expected approval, the St. Petersburg-Clearwater Area Convention and Visitors Bureau will spend $940,000 on advertising in April, May and June. The bureau had frozen almost all of its ad spending a month ago until marketers got a read on what the war did to travel. International travel remains hobbled. But marketers think Americans who had been thinking of flying overseas are prime prospects. "People are traveling and there is pent-up demand, so it's important we have our message out there," said Carole Ketterhagen, director of the visitors bureau. Many hotels say March turned out to be a strong month despite a slow start. Travel agents said they fielded a lot of questions about cancellation policies but few travelers actually backed out. Still, travel has not rebounded to pre-9/11 levels. "March was great, but people are not booking until seven days before they get here," said Russ Kimball, general manager of the Sheraton Sand Key in Clearwater. A major problem, however, is that financially devastated airlines have cut back the number of seats they fly from Tampa International Airport by 12.3 percent this April compared with April 2001. "It is not a good story," said George Elbe, the airport's airline service recruiter. Still, the county Tourist Development Council on Wednesday voted to reopen the ad spigot and tap half of the bureau's $660,000 in reserves for a bigger ad campaign aimed at markets within a full day's drive. That includes the Northeast and Midwest. The money will be plowed into cooperative ad campaigns that are part of state and federal government-sponsored tourist marketing efforts aimed at war recovery. -- Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com
or (727) 893-8252.
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From the Times Business report
From the AP
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