A Tourism Office Falls Victim to Hard Times

SEATTLE — An alluring billboard beckoned to motorists on a busy industrial corridor here this spring. It displayed just one image, a panoramic view of a valley and mountains and sunshine, and one word, “Montana.”

Who paid for that advertisement? The State of Montana, naturally, out of money it designated for tourism marketing this year.

“They’ve done a great job, and they’re incredibly visible,” said Tom Norwalk, the president and chief executive of Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We’re not doing that. We’re going to be fortunate in the next six months to be able to maintain a Web site.”

Washington State has plenty of beauty of its own, of course, but it will not be paying for billboards featuring Puget Sound or Mount Rainier or the Space Needle anytime soon. This month, as a result of wide-ranging budget cuts passed this year by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, Washington became the only state in the nation with no statewide tourism office and no state money to promote itself to travelers.

The cut has been attributed purely to having to make tough choices between financing programs like public education and paying for glossy marketing campaigns. But at a time when some struggling states are aggressively branding and rebranding themselves to expand tourism — Michigan, hoping to offset images of manufacturing declines and Detroit’s urban decay, increased funds for its “Pure Michigan” campaign to $25 million this year from $17 million in 2010 — many tourism experts across the country believe Washington will soon regret what it is saving in the short term.

“Our lesson to Washington is that it’s been 18 years since we went dark in 1993, and we still haven’t gotten back to the national market share we had,” said Al White, head of the Colorado Tourism Office, which lost all financing in 1993 and did not regain a steady revenue stream until 2000. “It’s really difficult to affect market share positively, but it’s really easy to affect it negatively if you’re not out there.”

The Washington State Tourism Office employed six people in its office in Olympia, the capital, and had a budget of $1.8 million before it closed on June 30. The budget had been $7 million the previous year and more than $10 million several years before that. The state has transferred much of the office’s tangible property, including trade show booths, brochures and digital photo archives, to members of a tourism alliance formed this year with the goal of taking over statewide marketing coordination.

Tourism is the fourth-largest industry in Washington, and it has been on an upswing. Last year, visitor spending increased 7.4 percent over 2009, accounting for the second-best year on record, tourism experts say. The number of international visitors grew more than 30 percent, one of the fastest rates in the country.

But for all its natural beauty and Seattle’s urban appeal, Washington also has inherent challenges. Many people, particularly international tourists, have a limited grasp of the geography of the Northwest. And then there is the state’s name.

The name Washington was assigned by Congress in 1853, when the area was still a territory. Settlers seeking territorial status had requested that their new home be called Columbia, after the great river on its southern boundary. But some members of Congress were concerned that this would confuse the new territory with where they worked, the District of Columbia. Somehow, calling it Washington was seen as a better solution.

But a century and a half later, even though this Washington is on a different coast, has 10 times the population of the other one and is not known for political shenanigans, the name is still an issue. It can be hard just to know when to capitalize the word “state” if it appears after the word Washington. (Answer: it depends.)

These are just the kinds of things state tourism offices try to address. The current branding effort, put in place before the office shut down, features an abstract mountain and an evergreen tree and the phrase “Washington, the State,” wording that is intended to optimize Internet searches so they direct browsers to the state’s tourism Web site.

Aside from identity issues, Washington also faces competition from ambitious tourism efforts surrounding it. Montana’s campaign focuses on specific urban areas, Seattle, Minneapolis and Chicago among them, and has won awards for its creativity, including the wrapping of city buses with pastoral images of Big Sky Country.

British Columbia, next door in Canada (yes, the province was named for the river, which stretches from the Pacific Ocean through Washington across the Canadian border), will spend about $50 million on tourism this year. California will spend the same, relying mostly on fees paid by businesses in the travel and tourism industry.

“It’s a shortsighted way of thinking,” Cathy Keefe, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Travel Association, said of the cuts in Washington. “You have to be constantly reinforcing the message. If you don’t, people will forget about you. There’s always going to be someone who’s stepping in there to take over your market share.”

Ms. Keefe pointed to data showing that 27 of 47 states her group surveyed had either maintained or increased their tourism spending in the past year — despite the lingering effects of the recession — and that 12 had increased it by at least 10 percent.

In Washington, a range of tourism businesses quickly created the Washington Tourism Alliance in an effort to compensate for losing the state office. The nonprofit group includes big agencies like Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau and smaller operations like Indian-owned casinos and ski resorts. The alliance has just formed a board and is about to hire an interim director. Next year, it is to take control of the state tourism Web site, and its leaders say they hope eventually to create a revenue stream for the group similar to California’s.

In the meantime, Montana hopes its marketing campaign, will keep the state, as those in tourism say, “top of mind.”

“If you live in the greater Puget Sound area and you don’t want to go to Montana by now, you haven’t been paying attention,” said Marsha Massey, executive director of the Washington State Tourism Office — until it closed. “Even I want to go to Montana.”