N.O. looking safer to tourists, study says
But regional visits down by 700,000
New Orleans' image as a safe and exciting tourist destination has improved since 1996, but the city might have lost some of its regional market share to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, according to a new survey on local tourism scheduled to be released today.
According to the study, conducted by the consulting firm Longwoods International of Toronto, 30 percent of the people surveyed "strongly agreed" that New Orleans is "safe in tourist areas." That was a rise of 8 percentage points from the 22 percent who strongly agreed in a 1996 survey.
In addition, New Orleans surpassed San Francisco as an exciting destination, the survey said. This year, 75 percent of respondents strongly agreed that New Orleans is an "exciting"city. That compares with 66 percent who strongly agreed that Orlando is exciting and 65 percent who said the same of San Francisco.
New Orleans was measured against San Francisco because the California town is the "gold standard" tourist city and against Orlando because it is an important regional competitor, said Gary Esolen, executive vice president of the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp., which commissioned the survey.
Mayor Marc Morial said the survey indicated that his administration and the City Council had improved public safety in the city.
"The most important thing is that we keep the momentum going," Morial said.
Despite the good news, New Orleans appears to have lost market share to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Esolen said. Although the number of overnight trips to the city increased to 11.1 million in 1998 from 11 million in 1997, there was a significant decline in the key segment of "marketable pleasure trips" by regional visitors. Those trips declined from 3 million in 1997 to 2.3 million in 1998, the survey said.
The Tourism Marketing Corp. is a public-private entity financed by the New Orleans tourism industry and the city of New Orleans. The organization markets the city to leisure travelers through advertising campaigns and focuses on attracting visitors during slow periods such as the summer and in December.
"We used to be alone between Orlando and San Antonio as a regional destination, but we're not alone anymore," Esolen said, referring to the casino resorts on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The survey does not directly link the decline in regional tourists to the Gulf Coast, Esolen said. But he added: "It's the only hypothesis anyone can come up with."
One reason for the hypothesis is the sources of regional visitors, Esolen said. Although travel from Texas, Alabama and Tennessee increased, travel from Mississippi, Florida and other parts of Louisiana declined, leading Esolen to speculate that the Gulf Coast is siphoning some of the market share that New Orleans had held with little worry from nearby competitors.
The Gulf Coast casino resorts are "either going to be empty or they're going to get their business from somewhere," Esolen said. "And they're getting it from their backyard."
Esolen said he would propose to recoup some of the lost business by directing more advertising to large national markets such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
"New Orleans has a huge amount of latent potential" from those markets, said Bill Siegel, president of Longwoods.
The survey was based on a random sample of 1,000 households contacted by mail, including 500 households in the New Orleans area and other areas where New Orleans has targeted advertising. A total of 664 surveys were returned.