Tourism on the rise in Seattle, King County

New tourism numbers for Seattle and King County show modest growth in the number of visitors and spending, which came up just short of $6 billion for 2011.

It’s not the top industry here, as it is in Nevada or Hawaii, but tourism is still big in Washington.

“It’s a $15 billion industry in the state and what’s happened over the last number of years is it’s gotten more and more competitive with states and cities competing for discretionary dollars for trips, meetings and conventions like never before,” said Tom Norwalk, President and CEO of Seattle’s Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.

He’s pleased that the numbers were up in 2011, with overnight visitors in Seattle and King County at 9.9 million, up almost four percent from 2010. Those visitors spent about $5.9 billion, an increase of 6.6 percent.

But inflation adjusted, Norwalk says tourism growth is a modest one-and-a-half to two percent.

“So it’s not robust and I think that’s very much the story of what we’re seeing happen. We’re seeing good occupancy growth in the hotels, we’re seeing more activity in restaurants and we’re seeing more people here. We’re not necessarily seeing a big increase in revenues yet and I think that’s why we need to keep marketing and promoting.”

Travel and tourism industry representatives met in Seattle Wednesday to hear the latest statistics on visitor trips, spending, tax contributions, employment and other key numbers.

Washington might be the only state in the country without a funded state tourism office. Norwalk says the convention and visitor’s bureau has just begun to collect money from a new Seattle Tourism Improvement Area. Fifty-four downtown hotels are paying a $2 a night assessment to go toward promoting overnight visits to Seattle during the off season. That fund should bring in $6-$7 million a year.

“Economic issues around the country and really around the world, have forced cities to really be quite creative and D.M.O.s, destination marketing groups like ourselves to figure out how do we find money to do a competitive job,” said Norwalk.

About plans to build a new sports arena in Seattle, Norwalk calls it a great opportunity. He argues, for example, that the Seahawks are a huge tourism attraction and so are the Huskies.

“Depending on their schedule, we’ve had weekends when the Huskies bring in a great traveling opponent [and] the revenues have been off the charts as a direct reflection of teams and fans that come [to town],” said Norwalk.

Norwalk rejects the argument that a new arena would be revenue neutral, siphoning off discretionary sports dollars from other teams, events and stadiums.

Overall, Norwalk says the Seattle area is off to a good tourism start in 2012, based on hotel occupancies, one of the better starts since 2007, the city’s high water mark for hotel stays and before the big recession.