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Wildfire Footage Doesn’t Seem to Deter Visitors

With the peak summer travel season getting underway over Memorial Day weekend, tourism leaders were confident that global news coverage of recent wildfires would not keep visitors away from San Diego County’s hotels and top attractions.

Joe Terzi, the San Diego Tourism Authority’s president and CEO, was a local executive with Starwood Hotels & Resorts the last time San Diego was hit by major wildfires in 2007, and he fielded numerous queries — during and after the fires — from customers wondering how their hotel bookings might be affected.

In response to the recent fires, however, while a tour guide friend in Africa emailed Terzi to ask how he and his family were, there are few indications from hotel operators that the wildfires have altered upcoming plans for travel to the region.

“I’m not hearing this time about people worried about coming here, and our office is not getting calls and emails about it,” Terzi said, adding that the region’s overall hotel bookings for 2014 are ahead of the pace seen at this point in 2013.

At press time, the fires that started on May 13 and burned more than 26,000 acres throughout the region had been largely contained. While the regional damage toll had not been tallied, Carlsbad reported $22.5 million in damage from the Poinsettia fire that hit that city on May 14, destroying homes, apartment buildings and at least two commercial structures.

Hotels and attractions that initially closed or sent workers home when the fire struck Carlsbad — including Park Hyatt Aviara Resort and Legoland California Resort — were essentially back to full operations by the following day.

Theme park operators were expecting any hesitant visitors to be outnumbered in coming weeks by those taking in two new attractions that were scheduled to debut May 24: Legoland’s Lego Legends of Chima Water Park, based on a popular line of Lego toys featured in a kid-centric TV cartoon show; and the recently completed 5-acre, $19.5 million Tiger Trail habitat at San Diego Zoo Safari Park near Escondido.

The Safari Park, as well as the flagship San Diego Zoo in Balboa Park, did not see unusual attendance patterns during the past two weeks, said Ted Molter, chief marketing officer for San Diego Zoo Global, which oversees both parks.

The one significant fire-related adjustment came on May 15, when the Safari Park canceled its daily Cheetah Run over concerns about air quality problems caused by wildfires burning in areas to the west. Otherwise, Molter said many of the phone queries fielded at both parks came from families in neighborhoods throughout the region where public schools had been temporarily closed during the fires.

“A lot of it was parents calling because their kids were home from school, and they needed a place to take them for the day,” Molter said.

Zoo Debuts

Zoo officials will be focused in coming weeks on debuts of more attractions at the Balboa Park facility, including a new mountain lion exhibit and new themed entertainment offerings at the zoo’s Asian and Australian animal habitats. In the meantime, Molter said local and state tourism officials have been getting the word out that San Diego attractions are fully in business, despite significant damage done by the fires in portions of the region.

While the fires were at their peak, Terzi said, the Tourism Authority pulled a few San Diego advertising spots that had been scheduled to run in outside markets, such as Phoenix and Los Angeles. That was to avoid having images of fun-loving San Diego visitors being juxtaposed with TV news footage of destructive wildfires, which would have been perceived as insensitive.

With the fires essentially contained, the Tourism Authority was pressing ahead with marketing the region to summer travelers. Terzi said the agency’s marketing budget has been fully restored from levels seen a year ago, when funding was held up by a dispute over approval of the Tourism Marketing District that supplies the bulk of the Tourism Authority’s budget.

The Tourism Authority has invested about $12.5 million in regional marketing efforts for the January-to-June 2014 period, the highest six-month tally in the authority’s history, Terzi said.

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