Tourism Groups Pull Together Turf Wars Fade As Plans For Cooperative Marketing Take Shape

(From For the Record, Tuesday, June 25, 1996:) The North Idaho Travel Committee has applied for a grant through the Idaho Travel Council. A story in Sunday’s business section named the wrong entity as applying for the grant.

For North Idaho tourism marketers, it could be a coming-of-age summer.

The fractious bunch of visitors bureaus and chambers of commerce have joined hands for the first time, asking the state for money to pitch the Panhandle.

Each summer the tourism denizens of Sandpoint, Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls and the Silver Valley vie for a few hundred thousand dollars of state marketing money. Until now, it’s been every city or group for itself.

But with the formation of the new North Idaho Tourism Alliance, the unified group is a good bet to get a lump of money in July.

Bob Templin, who proposed the unification concept, is the Panhandle representative on the Idaho Travel Council board. The board will dole out about $376,000 to the agencies, which represents 45 percent of North Idaho’s lodging tax last year.

Templin invited Panhandle tourism leaders to his resort in Post Falls March 28. His goal was to show them that as the tourism business is getting tougher, it makes much more sense to work together.

Since the dissolving of the Coeur d’Alene Convention and Visitors Bureau in late 1995, Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls each have tried to position themselves as the dominant tourism marketer in Kootenai County.

Coeur d’Alene’s busy Chamber of Commerce absorbed the tourism marketing duties of the former bureau, creating Visitors Plus.

Meanwhile, tiny Post Falls Tourism Inc. reinvented itself as the Kootenai County Convention and Visitors Bureau, co-opting smaller communities in the county on its board of directors and building spiffy new visitor centers.

Talk of merging the two never got off the ground, hindered in part by personality conflicts. The distrust extended beyond Kootenai County, as few tourism leaders initially embraced the idea of marketing under one banner.

The bottom line may have swayed them. The North Idaho economy relies more and more on tourism for new jobs. While not struggling as an industry, tourism here no longer grows at the break-neck pace of the early 1990s.

A changing Canadian economy is one reason. The Canadian dollar continues a three-year period of weakness, which makes Inland Northwest goods and services more expensive for Canadian tourists.

Some hoteliers and attractions that once captured a third of their summer business from customers who live north of the border have seen that share drop to single digits.

When the Canadian crisis developed, tourism marketers responded two years ago. They focused on Missoula and the Tri-Cities for new visitors instead of Alberta and British Columbia.

But to keep growing, North Idaho tourism needs to target more new and repeat visitors than can come from those smaller communities.

When tourism leaders sat down at Templin’s, the virtues of cooperative marketing hit home.

Pitching the region as a whole makes a lot more sense than each roadside attraction doing its own thing.

“Site-specific” ads - for example, one touting a ski package at Schweitzer Mountain Ski Resort in Sandpoint - appeal to the local market, says Jonathan Coe, executive director of Sandpoint’s Chamber of Commerce and tourism development group. All tourist businesses have to appeal to locals for year-round income.

But specific ads don’t resonate much with people outside the region who wouldn’t know North Idaho from a potato in the ground.

Tourism marketing veterans think a focusing on the range of activities will generate interest from the other side of the Cascades. Once they’re interested, they’ll call for the more specific information, and the alliance grant would create a brochure that explains what each area of North Idaho offers. Right now, each community has its own packets for visitors.

“We will all get the benefit, wherever someone calls for information,” Coe says. “We won’t be wasting dollars doing our own thing.”

Coe - initially skeptical himself about some of the aspects of the alliance - will administer whatever grant money the alliance gets.

The alliance grant targets the potentially lucrative Seattle market, a strategy that North Idaho attractions such as Silverwood Theme Park have tried.

“We’re going where no grant writers around here have gone before,” Coe says.

The grant would develop ads high-lighting skiing, hiking, festivals, and glimpses of some of the “site-specific” fun like Silverwood’s The Grizzly roller coaster or Silver Mountain’s gondola ride, but without actually mentioning those places.

By keeping the brand names out of the spots such as the Coeur d’Alene Resort or Factory Outlets Mall in Post Falls, the grant hopes to avert turf wars that have dampened previous plans to combine tourism marketing efforts.

Templin, as the Panhandle representative, will come up with proposed grant levels for North Idaho, which the board then approves. As Templin looks at all the grant applications, he favors the alliance’s Seattle campaign.

“If we can get people in Seattle to think that North Idaho can be their four-season playground,” Templin says, “we’re going to make a big difference.”

However, some tourism leaders haven’t bought into the alliance. Robert Singletary of North Idaho Travel and Education Services was one of them.

He’s opened his own visitor center in downtown Coeur d’Alene that competes with Visitors Plus’ new center, and has submitted his own grant to the Idaho Travel Council to promote the area. Singletary didn’t return calls last week.

“I hope that those two groups can work together,” Templin says. “Maybe they can somehow combine their grant requests.”

The marketers have collectively asked the state for far more money than is available, as is the case each year. Along with the alliance grant proposal, nearly all communities are asking for money to market themselves.

Kootenai County Convention and Visitors Bureau has teamed with Visitors Plus to ask for $108,400 of marketing money, for example. The alliance grant asks for $138,350.

Templin could send a message to the marketers in how much he asks the travel council to grant for the regional approach compared to how much the standard local efforts get.

By pushing the alliance, while letting each community apply for money to market itself, Coe hopes to capture the best of both worlds.

“We’re moving slowly, and what we have now is not what it will look like in the final picture,” Coe says. “But we’ve taken the first big step.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos (1 color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: POWERFUL INCENTIVE Hoteliers and attractions that once saw a third of their summer business come from north of the border have seen that share drop to single digits.