Business people gathered at the Governor’s Conference on Tourism Tuesday were told to lobby their legislators for a bigger promotional budget to attract more visitors to the state and turn around a trend that shows the number of tourist trips to Maine has been flat since 2002.
“The return on investment is proven in tourism,” Dann Lewis, the director of the Maine Office of Tourism told the crowd gathered at the Augusta Civic Center. “Promotional spending must not be viewed as a cost; it must be viewed as an investment.”
The state’s tourism budget is around $7 million and is funded with 5 percent of the lodging and meals tax. At the same time the tourism industry contributes $531 million in tax revenue, Lewis said, making it the “largest single supplier of tax revenue” in the state.
“We must double if not triple the current budget,” he said, because right now “we do not have the resources to expand our reach.”
The good news is 2005 turned out to be a little better than the year before and the fall tourist season – despite the spike in gas prices thanks to back-to-back hurricanes – held its own, Lewis said.
Using the money it has, the Office of Tourism in 2006 will refocus its advertising in areas where most tourists come from now, Lewis said. Massachusetts accounts for 38 percent of Maine tourists; Massachusetts combined with the rest of New England equals 58 percent; and, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey contribute 15 percent.
The state also is looking to increase its web presence since research shows more people are using the Internet to decide where to go. Last year 40 percent of Maine’s advance bookings came in over the Internet versus the national average of 46 percent.
People also are making more last-minute decisions on where to travel, with 51 percent of the visitors coming here making those plans two months or less from the time of their departure.
That kind of research should be more readily available now that the state, in cooperation with the University System and the tourism industry, has funded a new research and training program known as CenTRO or Center for Tourism Research and Outreach.
Its website has just gone live at www.umaine.edu/centro
The center, which is based at the University of Maine in Orono, but involves all the state’s university campuses, will do research and provide local statistics about the tourism industry; help develop new markets; and train workers and entrepreneurs.
The state also is trying to fund more regional promotions.
During the morning session of the annual convention, which was expected to attract 290 people throughout the day, presentations were given on some projects that have been helped with state tourism grants this year. The state annually awards promotional matching grants to the state’s eight designated tourist regions and two specific projects.
In 2006, those project grants went to the World Junior Biathlon Championships in Fort Kent and for the Maine Fiber Arts Map and Tour. The Maine Fiber Arts Visitor Center is in Topsham and the first Open Studio and Farm Weekend will be held Aug. 4, 5 and 6 across the state.
The keynote speaker for Tuesday’s conference was Judy Randall of Randall Travel Marketing from North Carolina, who said she became a bird watcher when an eagle flew over her head on Cadilac Mountain in Bar Harbor. She talked about the need to understand what different generations of Americans want in order to be successful in tourism.
“There’s never been such a huge difference in generational groups,” she said, yet most tourist attractions and accommodations were built for the War Generation crowd, now in their 80s.
“The entire travel and tourism industry was built for them,” she said, yet the vast majority of travel decisions are now being made by Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers and the Millennium kids “who are bored easily and control what their parents do.”
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