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FeedDavid Peckinpaugh
Dialogue with Tom Blair
TOM BLAIR: Next month, you’ll be celebrating your first anniversary with ConVis. A year at the helm of an organization charged with the marketing of San Diego’s third-largest industry, tourism. What’s your sense of the health of our visitor industry?
DAVID PECKINPAUGH: The overall industry is very healthy. We just came off a record year. Attendance was up at the attractions; we had all-time record occupancy for hotels . . .
TB: You’re talking about 2006, a new record after a 2005 record of $5.9 billion?
DP: Yes——$6.9 billion direct visitor spending last year. The forecast for ’07 is basically flat for hotel occupancy, but that has more to do with the increase in rooms coming on line. The average room rate is predicted to be up by the end of the year, by 5 to 6 percent.
TB: Historically, the city’s TOT, the transient occupancy tax on hotels and motels, has provided the bulk of the budget for convention and visitor marketing. But with the city’s propensity for finding new ways to spend that money, the ConVis share has been shrinking in recent years. Your predecessor saw his funding from the city shrink from $14 million a year in 2003 to $8.8 million last year. What kind of shape are you in now?
DP: Well, before I got here, all the cuts had predominantly happened. It had gone from a staff of 102 down to 59. So the majority of the slashing and burning had occurred. We’re more in the recovery and stabilization mode——and looking to the future for growth. We’re preparing for, hopefully, future funding and looking at what we need to do to continue to grow. Because the supply of rooms is going to continue to grow over the next three to five years and longer, we have to keep driving new visitors to the destination just to maintain what we have, let alone grow it.
TB: Well, maybe you’d better be careful, because as your funding has been shrinking, the industry has been growing at a record rate every year.
DP: (Laughs.) Well, the figures lag behind. You can stop investing, and you’re not going to feel it in year one, two or three. But it’s years three to five to seven where you’re going see that drop-off in production. And it’s happening at a time when we can’t afford it——because of the increased supply and the incredible change that’s happening in the competitive marketplace.
TB: Before you took the job here, you were the head of an $80 million corporation that specialized in meeting planning. But over the past several years, the San Diego Convention Center Corporation has taken on more and more responsibility for the marketing of meetings and conventions here. That produced something of a tug-of-war between convention center management and your predecessor at ConVis, Reint Reinders. What’s your relationship with convention center boss Carol Wallace?
DP: It has been great. In my first year, I came in and talked about the three Ps——people, planning and performance. On the people side, it’s not only the people here at ConVis, it’s all of our stakeholders and those key relationships within the industry. And the number-one relationship that needed to be addressed was with the convention center. There was a lot of mistrust and miscommunication. I think Carol and I got together within my first 14 days here, and we have met once a month since then. On a scale of 1 to 10, we’re probably at a
It comes down to the overall mix of the destination. That’s where I think we’re really rich; we’ve got more assets than any other destination in the country. It is not just our big three or four attractions that bring people here. Certainly, we still do a lot of co-op advertising with those big attractions, but we’re also trying to diversify.
7 or 8 on the relationship scale. We’ve got two assigned champions, one on each side, who are responsible for the day-in, day-out communication, so we avoid missteps and misunderstanding. We have a work group that meets about once a quarter to look at how we can better collaborate and where opportunities for cooperation exist. So much comes down to communication and the ability to sit down and be honest and build trust by being true to our word. Also, relationships with others, like San Diego North CVB and San Diego East CVB, that were not in the best of shape——we’ve done very similar things with them. And then it comes down to the second P, the plan. We’re now in the execution phase of a new strategic plan, and we’ve assigned champions to each of those relationships, and we’re developing written plans for each. Then we come to the third P, performance, and I’m going to be held accountable for that. TB: You’ve used that word “champion” twice. Is that a new buzz word?
DP: I’ve used it for a long time. That’s the key person in each relationship responsible for communication and responsibility and accountability for resolving issues. If you don’t have someone who owns that relationship, it’s going to falter.
TB: San Diego’s hotel and motel operators have expressed frustration for years at the dwindling resources available for promotion of their industry. Now, they’ve decided to levy a 2 percent tax on themselves to pay for their own marketing arm through a Tourism Marketing District (TMD). Will that weaken the influence of ConVis? Do you think the city will see that as an opening to make further cuts in its contribution of TOT funds to ConVis?
DP: As far as influence, the Hotel-Motel Association and Lodging Industry Association have been working very closely since the first of the year to get this moving forward. We are not at the table; we’ll be a beneficiary, so we’re in the role of key interested party. ConVis will be guaranteed a minimum of 50 percent of the money raised from the assessment——it’s not a tax——and that would get us back to our original funding of four to five years ago. And then we’ll have the ability to apply for additional funds based on a program of work. Say if we came to the TMD board and said, “We have a three- or five-year campaign to grow business out of China,” they would be able to make a decision to fund that above and beyond our 50 percent.
TB: Los Angeles has traditionally provided San Diego with the lion’s share of visitors, mostly weekend getaways. Has the record-high price of gasoline had any negative effect on that market?
DP: You know, it really hasn’t. We did a lot of analysis of that last summer. And AAA did a study. And we both came out with a finding that it was really having zero impact on the traveler. If you look at the overall budget of a traveler making a decision to visit, by the time they’re doing hotel rooms and restaurants and attraction tickets, et cetera, the cost of fuel was really minor. It’s something we’re always keeping an eye on. If it went to $10 a gallon we’d probably have an issue, but in the area we’re looking at, the projections for the summer indicate we’ll be fine.
TB: The big three for-profit tourist attractions here——SeaWorld, the San Diego Zoo/ Wild Animal Park and Legoland——have for years been a major lure for visitors. But our theme parks have been more vulnerable lately to competition from Los Angeles and Orange County. What is ConVis doing to find new ways of attracting tourists?
DP: It comes down to the overall mix of the destination. That’s where I think we’re really rich; we’ve got more assets than any other destination in the country. It is not just our big three or four attractions that bring people here. Certainly, we still do a lot of co-op advertising with those big attractions, but we’re also trying to diversify. One thing is the San Diego Soundscape promotion. There’s an example of using a relatively unknown or unexposed asset of the local destination in a unique way to drive demand toward the destination as a whole.
TB: Your latest marketing campaign includes a promotion involving San Diego’s independent rock music scene. The promo includes a two-CD set featuring local artists in radio spots and a Web site aimed at getting Gen-Xers to book music-related travel to San Diego. How’s it working?
DP: A big partner in this is Insomnia Radio, an Internet station, and their core demographic is 32 to 54, which is one of our ideal targets. So it doesn’t skew as young as you would think. Initially, I wondered if it would be talking to the audience we want. It turns out it’s exactly who we want. It’s very new, and we still have big promotions coming up with VH1. But one of the bands on the CD has already been signed to a recording contract because of radio play and the Web site recognition. And they’ve got e-mails from people as far away as Japan to find out when and where they’re performing, so they can make a trip to San Diego to see them. We’re trying to be really aggressive and creative with the dollars we have. Overall, this is not an expensive campaign——not at all as big as the budget we spend on the national cable buy we do every year, which is just about a million dollars. This is somewhere in the $40,000 range.
TB: When Reinders left the ConVis Bureau a year ago, after 15 years, he said the city needed to invest more to “bring Balboa Park to world-class status” and complete Mission Bay Park. Do you agree? And is anything being done in that regard?
DP: I think Reint is absolutely right. Balboa Park is the crown jewel of the destination. It’s the iconic draw of our destination. And it needs to be invested in. Right now, the focus is on laying plans for the park’s centennial celebration in 2015. We’re partnering with the city to do some of the legwork in preparation for the marketing of the anniversary of the 1915 Exposition. But the focus and plans that are laid for the centennial are really going to drive the reinvestment in that park.
TB: What about private money for the park?
DP: That’s going to be the key. It’s sponsorships; it’s getting creative. What we’re doing right now is looking at what other similar celebrations have done——looking at everything from Disneyland to what’s happened internationally——what models have been used, how they paid for it.
TB: What about naming rights?
DP: I think all that is fair game. I don’t know if the city would have the taste for naming rights——I‘m not going to speak for them on naming rights——but I do think we have to put together a menu of options for how we can not just rely on the city for the money but still put together a game plan that’s going to do what needs to be done for Balboa Park. This is going to be a situation where it’s all hands on deck. We’ve got to all get together on a summit on Balboa Park and bring in all the leaders and creative minds.
TB: Okay, I have to ask you this: A generation ago, a fellow named Sam Peckinpaugh, the director, made one of the most violent movies ever, called The Wild Bunch. Are you any relation to him?
DP: He was my father’s second cousin, twice removed, I think.
TB: So you don’t have any of that violence in you?
DP: You never know; you don’t want to get on my bad side. But you know, that is my daughter’s name. Sam Peckinpaugh. Samantha.
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