They spend the day -- and a lot of cash

Survey of local tourism sings a paean to the underappreciated daytripper
If you're in the hotel business in Philadephia, you may not want to hear this. It turns out that visitors who come to town just for the day are a more vital part of the region's tourism market than many people suspected.

That was one of the surprising conclusions presented yesterday to the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. and a half-dozen other agencies by a market-research firm. The firm had been hired to find out where visitors are from, how much they spend, and how they learn about the region.

Among other important but not necessarily-surprising facts unearthed by the survey, conducted by Longwoods International, of Toronto: Philadelphia tourism promoters should be glad the city lives in the shadow of New York.

That's because there are lots of people in and around the Big Apple, and the New York area was the biggest single source of the 40.6 million day-trippers and overnight visitors who came from other cities and states to Philadelphia and its Pennsylvania suburbs in 1997.

Almost one-quarter -- 23 percent -- of those 40.6 million travelers who came for business, pleasure, or to visit friends and relatives hailed from New York, with people from Washington a distant second at 6 percent, the research found.

The Tourism Marketing Corp. is a two-year-old group that is using $12 million in funding, half of it from the Pew Charitable Trusts and one-quarter each from the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania governments, to advertise the region widely for the first time as a visitor destination. It paid Longwoods $160,000 to conduct the survey.

William Siegel, president of Longwoods, a research company that specializes in measuring tourism's effect throughout North America, said Philadelphia is fortunate to have the large population centers of the Northeast from which to draw visitors. Longwoods gathered the information from 1,000 mail-in questionnaires.

Many tourist meccas, including Hawaii and New Orleans, where Longwoods has done research, don't have similar dense pockets of population nearby from which to draw visitors, he said.

"What was really surprising to us was how important your day-tripper business was ... and your day-trippers are spending money," Siegel said during one of two presentations of the survey findings he made to local groups yesterday. "This is very unusual, compared to other parts of the United States."

The study determined that visitors to the five-county region spent about $3.8 billion in 1997, with 37 percent of that, or $1.4 billion, coming from the 30.3 million people who did not stay overnight.

The survey also found a healthy awareness of the "Philadelphia -- the place that loves you back" advertising campaign in the states surrounding Pennsylvania where it ran last year.

The research was completed too early this year to measure any effect of advertising this spring, Siegel said. More analysis of the research data and other information about spending patterns of visitors is needed to determine how to get the biggest bang for the advertising bucks, he added.

"The bottom line is hard return on advertising, or how much are you getting back for the advertising dollars spent," Siegel said.

Tourism Marketing Corp. president Meryl Levitz said she was pleased to get a preliminary look at how television advertising appears to be boosting the image of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania as places to visit.

"What we wanted the research for is to tell us how to spend our money more wisely," Levitz said. "TV tends to be the best place."

The data on how much visitors are spending mean that, for the first time, Philadelphia promoters "are beginning to close in on what a tourist is worth," she said. And in a play on the "place that loves you back" ad theme, Levtiz added: "We're learning that we should love back our day-trippers, too."