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Sales:
MPI International Board Meets in Sonoma Country
SCTB’s Chyrl Collins Earns CTIS Designation
Incentive Program Gets Fabulous!
PR, Marketing and Partnerships:
Sonoma Country Represented in National Campaign
Thousands Hear Sonoma Country Message via Amgen Partnership
Gay & Lesbian Travel Trends
SCTB Info:
Winter Tourism Forum Wrap-Up
Las Vegas is on the Horizon
Odds and Ends:
Santa Rosa ranks 23 on the top 50 green cities list in Popular Science
SRJC Career Expo & Job Fair Slated
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Sales
International Board of Meeting
Professionals International Meets in Sonoma Country
The Sonoma County Tourism Bureau hosted the International Board of Directors of Meeting Professionals International for their 2008 meeting and we were thrilled to have this high-ranking hospitality group hold their prestigious meeting in Sonoma. MPI board members are “opinion makers” in the hospitality industry and can influence their meeting-planner members to bring their own events to Sonoma Country.
MPI is the meetings and events industry’s largest global community with nearly 23,000 worldwide members. Seventy-one Fortune 100 companies are represented in the MPI membership. The organization’s membership is evenly split between planner and supplier professional members. Founded in 1972, the Dallas-based organization has 68 chapters and clubs around the World. For more information, visit www.mpiweb.org.
SCTB’s Chyrl Collins Earns CTIS Designation
Congratulations to Chyrl Collins, CMP, CTIS, Sonoma County  Tourism Bureau’s Tour and Travel Sales Manager. Chyrl successfully completed the course requirements to earn her Certified Travel Industry Specialist (CTIS) designation.
Chyrl and other graduates were honored at a special ceremony recently during the 2008 American Bus Marketplace in Virginia Beach, VA.
The Certified Travel Industry Specialist program is administered for ABA by Indiana University/Purdue University Indianapolis and is the first university-administered certification program in the group travel industry. The professional development program is available to any employee of an ABA-member organization. Participants completed five correspondence courses over the past year, and attended and evaluated eight Industry Advancement Seminars presented at the American Bus Marketplace.
Incentive Program Publicity Pushes Sonoma Country – Fabulous!
 Publicity for the meetings incentive program kicked into high gear last week when meeting planners received printed postcards and an email blast from the SCTB highlighting the incentive program.
The postcards and eblast are part of a series showing what a Sonoma Country meeting would look like with a $4,000 bonus.
The first postcard featured Robin McKee-Cant, Meeting Sales and Services Manager, stepping from a Horizon Air flight looking oh-so-chic, trailed by her loyal personal valet, SCTB Information Specialist Craig Haskell.
Publicity for the campaign will continue with more photo montages taking a fabulous twist on a Sonoma Country meeting. A sustained public relations effort will also aim to keep the incentive in meetings trade publications.
The incentive program’s goal is to increase mid-week bookings at Sonoma Country properties, and includes offers for meetings from 50 room nights to more than 301. Find out more online.
A complementary incentive program will entice group tour planners to choose Sonoma Country as a destination when planning their programs, and will also be supported by a business-to-business marketing and public relations component.
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PR, Marketing and Partnerships
Sonoma Country Represented in National Campaign
If you haven’t seen it yet, a national campaign is under way touting wine and food with a California flair: “The Land of Wine and Food” campaign is a partnership between the California Travel & Tourism Commission (CTTC) and the Wine Institute.
The website, www.LandofWineandFood.com, features wine and food celebrities, and highlights the state’s wine and food discoveries to the fast-growing travel segment of culinary connoisseurs – and those who aspire to be. Check out stories and blogs from Sonoma Country’s own Duskie Estes and John Stewart, of zazu and Bovolo, Ziggy "The Wine Gal" Eschliman, Mike Benziger of Benziger Family Winery, an Guy Fieri of Johnny Garlic’s and Tex Wasabi’s.
Thousands Hear Sonoma Country Message via Amgen Partnership
The three-year-old Amgen Tour of California, an eight-day "rolling" festival, is already one of the nation's largest annual sports events; and the Sonoma County Tourism Bureau was there. The road race features elite professional teams and athletes from around the world, competing for the highest prize purse of any cycling race in North America.
SCTB Team members followed the tour and staffed booths at the various stages, including Stage 1 in Santa Rosa and the finish line in Pasadena. The Sonoma County Tourism Bureau sponsored the kids’ cycling event, and staffed a double booth in Santa Rosa and greeted visitors from New York, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Phoenix, and Southern California. More than 350 visitors throughout the event asked SCTB to send them more information about Sonoma Country.
Also in Santa Rosa, the public relations team sponsored the media room and was able to tell the Sonoma Country story to more than 50 journalists.
There are more recreational cyclists in the United States than skiers, golfers and tennis players combined. Cycling is consistently ranked one of the country's top three participation sports and California leads the nation in cycling participation.
While the numbers for 2008 aren't in, here are some quick highlights of the 2007 event:
Largest spectator sporting event in America, with more than 1.6 million spectators.
• 700,000 unique visitors to the official tour website.
• More than 176,000 streamed hours of online audio and video on the new Tour Tracker 2.0.
• 14 hours of race coverage on Verus.
• International TV broadcasts reached 30 million households in 180 countries.
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SCTB Info
Winter Tourism Forum Wrap-Up
More than 90 hospitality and tourism professionals attended SCTB’s free winter tourism forum last week. Held at the Sonoma Golf Club, the forum included Bob Hoelscher, chairman and CEO of the National Tour Association, speaking on baby boomer travelers, and Matthew Boone, Director of Asia Marketing of the California Travel and Tourism Commission speaking about the international travel market.
The SCTB also introduced some of our latest initiatives, such as the incentive program, and the one-stop shopping section of the website for community partners, where local businesses can submit events for the printed and online calendars, read SCTB updates, submit items for press releases, and more.
All of the PowerPoints are available for view in the partners section of the website, under “SCTB Updates”: www.sonomacounty.com/partners/index.
Las Vegas is on the Horizon
Advertising for Horizon Air’s new Las Vegas flight is ramping up. Starting April 24, Horizon will be offering flights to Sonoma Country from Las Vegas.
This will open up Sonoma Country to Midwest and East Coast travelers. The SCTB will be promoting the new service at trade shows and with media visits.
Gay & Lesbian Travel Trends
Are you actively marketing to gay and lesbian travelers? If so, we'd like to know more about what you're doing and any specials you are offering. E-mail your information to us.
Not actively marketing to this target population yet?
Consider the results of a new traveler survey from Community Marketing, Inc.:
More than three-quarters (76 percent) of U.S. lesbian and gay respondents have a current passport, compared to 24 percent to 30 percent of all adult US citizens.
Gay and lesbian travelers took a median of five overnight trips in the preceding twelve months, including two leisure, two personal and one business trip. 24 percent took five or more leisure trips, 24 percent took five or more personal trips, and 19 percent took five or more business trips.
Respondents spent an average of 14 nights in hotels; 77 percent purchased accommodations online at least once. The top motivations for choosing a hotel are reputation for gay-friendliness and location near attractions.
Gays and lesbians choose vacation destinations that are recommended by friends, offer unique attractions, and have a reputation for gay friendliness. The availability of online information is important in getting the necessary information to this audience to plan a trip.
Based on tourism industry data from the US Department of Commerce and CMI sample demographics, the annual economic impact of LGBT travelers is approximately $64.5 billion in the US alone.
Contact SCTB with your marketing ideas, specials and campaigns; e-mail your information to us.
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Odds and Ends for $800, Alex:
Santa Rosa ranks 23 on the top 50 green cities list in Popular Science
Santa Rosa’s ranking is in part due to steam-generated electricity. The Geysers, in the redwood-studded wilderness outside Santa Rosa, is the world’s largest geothermal installation. At the Geysers, pipes send the steam from the drilled wells to central collection facilities, where it is used to power 31 steam turbines. The system generates more than 850 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 850,000 homes on the California grid. This system replaces conventional processes that would have released 570 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. For more information, visit www.popsci.com/environment/article/2008-02/americas-50-greenest-cities.
SRJC Career Expo & Job Fair Slated
Santa Rosa Junior College is looking for businesses to participate in the Eighth Annual Career Expo & Job Fair. You will have an opportunity to meet with hundreds of job seekers and potential candidates.
The event will be on Wednesday, April 30, from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the Santa Rosa Campus in Haehl Pavilion.
Visit www.santarosa.edu for more information on how to register for the event. This is a sell-out event, so act now.
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