LA, Chicago move to draw more toruists and conventioneers

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel says he wants to open tourism offices in Brazil, Germany and Japan this year to attract more oversea visitors, while LA is expanding its own efforts with a new name and organization changes.

City of Chicago officials say they’re particularly interested in attracting overseas visitors.

"We are the No. 3 city in the country, yet we’re 10th on foreign tourists to the city of Chicago," said Chicago Mayor Emanuel. "I do not believe that the best kept secret in America should be the city of Chicago."

He told the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau at its annual meeting that he wants to "dramatically" increase the numbers of visitors  — to 50 million by 2020.

Chicago would have tourism offices on four continents with the addition of offices in Brazil, Germany and Japan.

Bruce Rauner, chairman of the convention bureau, said there will be further efforts to consolidate myriad municipal, regional and state efforts to attract visitors.

Chicago currently has five international sales offices — in Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Toronto and Beijing — and spends the "least of any major U.S. city" on international marketing, according to cvb officials.

"Las Vegas has 22 overseas offices. New York (18), Los Angeles (15) and San Francisco (13) also run circles around Chicago," writes the Chicago Sun-Times.

Chicago claimed just 4.3% of the 27 million overseas travelers to the US in 2010, compared to 32% for New York City.

In an effort to gets its message out more effectively, the city is consolidating its tourism marketing. Its tourism department is being merged with the convention bureau, and the resulting organization will be called Choose Chicago, it was announced recently.

Meanwhile, partly as a move to draw more conventioneers, the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau is changing its name to the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board.

"We spent a great deal of time discussing the merits of reframing our organization’s name to make it more consistent with our strategic goal of capturing more convention, meeting, and leisure tourism business," said Mark Liberman, president and CEO of Los Angeles Tourism.

Liberman added:

"Our former name, LA INC., did not reference the industry that we serve, nor did it clearly delineate our Los Angeles geography to our growing number of international visitors."

He noted that in 2011, the number of international visitors to Los Angeles jumped 6.7% over the previous year, to 5.9 million. In 2011, Los Angeles led the country in the growth of in-bound overseas arrivals, reinforcing the City’s growing popularity among overseas tourists.

Los Angeles is now third behind Orlando and New York City in numbers of total visitors.

By David Wilkening