Internet surfers come to H.B. too

More than a million people visited Huntington Beach for the first time last year via the Internet.

“That’s a lot of eyeballs on our website,” said Doug Traub, chief executive and president of the Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau. The bureau logged 1,058,000 unique visitors to its website in 2006, compared to a scant 2,200 five years earlier. A unique visitor is someone who may access a website several times but is counted only once. Typically, it is the preferred method of measuring Internet traffic.

Neighboring cities are also tracking visitors to their bureaus’ websites. In 2006, 1.66 million people visited the Anaheim/Orange County Visitor & Convention Bureau website, a 23% increase from 2005, according to the bureau’s communications manager Nicky See. The bureau covers both Anaheim and the entire county.

Newport Beach Conference & Visitors Bureau received 2 million page views in 2006 but did not release the number of unique visitors.

Some may attribute the surge in Huntington Beach’s popularity to the ongoing spat with Santa Cruz over which city is the real Surf City, USA.

The verbal salvos exchanged between the two cities have been covered by media all over the world. That might explain Santa Cruz getting about 1.3 million unique visitors to its conference and visitors bureau website that promotes the entire county.

Huntington Beach walked away with the trademark rights to Surf City, USA, which the bureau has systematically used in its promotion campaign.

This year, the bureau is planning an even bigger push to market the city by targeting specific audiences and using cost-saving measures.

“We had a slow migration from simply promoting Huntington Beach as a destination to branding it as Surf City, USA,” Traub said.

That has meant establishing a style guide for the bureau’s promotional materials, including its website and Web newsletters, visitors guide, rack brochure and its licensed products.

“All the materials are falling into a comparable look and feel; not a hodge-podge of 10 different looks and feel,” Traub said.

Besides unifying the look, the bureau is planning to roll out several new initiatives.

Bird-lovers and naturalists are the hot new segment that the bureau aims to attract to the Bolsa Chica wetlands.

“We were focusing a lot on families who can travel only during the summer season,” he said. “We needed to diversify from families, and the birders market is going to be strongest in winter, when we have idle capacity.”

Another demographic that the bureau plans to entice are seniors. In 2004, an Orange County Tourism Council survey found that Huntington Beach gets a higher proportion of senior travelers than anywhere else in Orange County, Traub said.

Council members are happy with the bureau’s efforts to sell Huntington Beach as a tourist destination.

“I see it [the bureau’s strategy] as making a push to get all types of visitors to come to Huntington Beach and using the diversity of our offerings,” Councilman Don Hansen said.

Hansen believes that tourism will be the main driver of the city’s success, although residents have expressed a dislike for tourists in a city survey.

That’s next on the bureau’s marketing agenda: explaining the benefits of tourism to local residents.

“I don’t believe that the average person is negatively affected by the tourism activity,” Hansen said. “Our beach is a little busier, but it pays for filling those potholes and extra police officers.”

The other alternative would be to increase fees and taxes on residents that he doesn’t support, Hansen added.

More tourists are also not welcomed by the downtown business improvement district leaders who say they have to pay more to clean up the mess left behind in downtown.

Although the business group plans to work with the bureau, the president of the downtown business group, Stephen Daniels, believes there is a key difference in their aims.

“Their main goal is to attract tourists; we want to attract locals,” he said. “We are trying to spearhead efforts to get locals to come downtown.”

The bureau plans to use the Internet, particularly e-mail newsletters, as the primary means of reaching those visitors and locals who want to tune in.

The bureau will roll out its new website in the next month and offer several free, subscription-based newsletters tailored for different uses. They will include one on special events, another for residents, and a newsletter for editors, magazine and newspaper writers as well as a general one on Huntington Beach.

The 2007 visitor’s guide, 75-pages long, has already hit the stands on Main Street and other venues with a record number of paid advertisers.

Tourism in Huntington Beach contributes about 6% to 7% of the city’s general fund budget and generates about 6,000 to 6,500 local jobs, according to the bureau.

“With three more hotels coming up, it’s very important that we continue to grow demand for our destination,” Traub said. “We are only scratching the tip of the surface here.”