Santa Barbara’s tourism sector is rebounding faster than many cities throughout California and nationwide. That was the purveying sentiment at the Santa Barbara Visitors and Conference Bureau and Film Commission’s Annual Tourism Luncheon on Thursday afternoon at Bacara Resort & Spa.
The keynote speaker was Chip Conley, a hotelier who built up a motel in San Francisco and transformed it into a series of successful boutique hotels called Joie de Vivre hospitality group.
“Santa Barbara is rebounding faster than the overall California tourism economy, and that’s a good thing,” Conley said. “I think what’s going to happen as occupancies go up, they will start raising room rates more than we have in the past couple years.”
There have been three consecutive monthly double-digit gains in transient occupancy tax, or bed tax, revenue year-to-date. The tourism industry has rebounded faster than expected, according to SBVCB & FB President/CEO Kathy Janega-Dykes.
The cities of Carpinteria, Goleta and Santa Barbara also formed the South Coast Tourism Business Improvement District, or TBID, at the beginning of last year. The regional body placed a small fee on rented rooms that went to the Santa Barbara Convention & Visitors Bureau and Film Commission to market the area to tourists. The TBID began its marketing efforts in July, and so far it has raised $1.48 million. Janega-Dykes said it has allowed Santa Barbara to target more international and domestic customers and increase its exposure.
“We’re a community with increasing confidence, and a lot of it is due to the recovery we’re seeing in the tourism industry,” she said. “Statistics show double-digit increases in TOT, impressive increases in RevPAR and hotel occupancy. Hotel experts are signaling there is a marketing opportunity for destinations and other travel suppliers to be proactive and reach out to travelers.”
Conley offered advice to improve Santa Barbara’s tourism sector through sharing his personal experiences growing a hospitality company. A successful hotelier starts with inspired and self-motivated employees, he said. On one of his business trips, he asked Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly why he hadn’t started charging for baggage similar to the other airlines.
“He pointed to the flight attendants and he said, ‘Have you noticed the flight attendants on Southwest are having a different experience with their work than the flight attendants on United?’ I said yes and he said, ‘Tell me what,’” Conley said. “‘They are fun, they seem like they are being real, they have a personality, a sense of humor.’ He said that’s right, after United started charging for bags the flight attendants, who didn’t like their job before, liked it less now when they had to be an engineer and figure out how to get all those damn bags in the stowaways and get off the ground on time.”
Conley said all managers should strive to make their employees feel like they have a calling, not a job. When the hotelier took over the small motel in San Francisco that previously charged by a hourly rate, he revamped the location to fit a personality and theme and hired staff who fit the mold.
He used Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to explain his method. Conley said the employee’s base motivation is survival or money; the next step is recognition, which translates to loyalty; and the final transformative step is meaning, which leads to inspiration.
When it comes to the customer’s needs, the best service revolves around satisfying needs that the customer didn’t even recognize. Conley’s hotels were one of the first ones to put personal computers in its rooms in 1989 and offer free Internet access by 1994.
“You’ve got to understand your customers,” said Conley, adding that the Santa Barbara website should add a personality profile to understand its customers. “And if you do, you’ll understand what they’ll want.”
Relating it back to the local level, Conley predicted that room rates will rise. He saw room for “funky, cool, artful” hotels downtown that appealed to a younger audience. He said Santa Barbara is sometimes perceived as a place for elderly people to relax.
“Whether it’s the Solstice Celebration or a lot of the other events that are culturally-driven,” Conley said, “I think Santa Barbara should promote itself as a great place for people to come up and spend the weekend.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Alex Kacik can be reached at akacik@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @NoozhawkBiz, @noozhawk and @NoozhawkNews. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.