Santa Barbara is back on top.
Visit Santa Barbara, the nonprofit organization responsible for marketing the city as a world-class destination, painted a glowing picture of Santa Barbara to the City Council on Tuesday.
“2022 has been very memorable,” said Kathy Janega-Dykes, president and CEO of Visit Santa Barbara. “We have welcomed many new visitors to the American Riviera.”
She showed a minute-long video depicting happy people riding bicycles, holding sea urchins, meditating, and drinking chardonnay, ending with the catchphrase, “There’s beauty, and then there’s Santa Barbara.”
In showing Santa Barbara’s return to greatness, Janega-Dykes pointed to statistics on a slide deck that stated that 14,400 hospitality jobs were lost, hotel occupancy dropped to 10% and 15 hotels closed down.
She also noted that Santa Barbara Airport travel in 2020 sunk to only six flights a day.
“Santa Barbara Airport could have been repurposed as a ghost town in a western movie,” Janega-Dykes said. “
But it’s a new day.
“This community has a way of coming out on top,” Janega-Dykes said.
She pivoted to show slides reflecting a spike in success.
Transient occupancy taxes are at an all-time high, hotel occupancy is about 76% and 14,700 hospitality jobs have been added.
She touted the groups for job fairs for helping to boost the total number of leisure and hospitality jobs in the county from 29,100 in 1019 to about 29,500 in 2022.
The CEO also showed an intriguing slide suggesting that Santa Barbara’s revenue per hotel room is up 44% from 2019. For Santa Barbara County, the growth was 37%. In California, however, the growth per room was down 2%.
The organization also plans to conduct a study to gather information on Santa Barbara’s South Coast visitors, local residents, airport travelers and cruise ship passengers.
“By this time next year, we will be able to more accurately share the benefits that cruise passengers have 0n downtown retailers, restaurants and certainly the recreation vendors throughout Santa Barbara,” Janega-Dykes said.
She also touted the organization’s earned media, which unlike advertising, is free media coverage obtained by an organization’s professional relationships with the press.
Magazines such as LA Weekly, Los Angeles Magazine and Thrillist all wrote stories about Santa Barbara.
Among the marquee gets for Visit Santa Barbara in 2020, however, was a series of stories by CBS Sunday Morning about Santa Barbara.
Despite all the cheery news, Janega-Dykes also warned that Santa Barbara and her organization must stay persistent because a recession may be near, and inflation is a potential tourism problem. She noted that although hotel revenue and occupancy are high, this past November showed a drop that was lower than the year prior.
“Our challenge is hotel rates rising slower than the rate of inflation,” Janega-Dykes said. “The bottom line is we have to continue to market aggressively.”
Councilman Eric Friedman credited Visit Santa Barbara for its work at highlighting Santa Barbara’s strengths.
“I just want to appreciate the work your organization has done both during to the pandemic and prior to that, during the fire and the debris flow,” Friedman said.
