Tourism Taskforce

[AquaMan]

People don't go to Austin, or any other city, because it brands itself. The branding more or less followed the personality of the city. Austin made use of that personality in their marketing efforts. I remember long ago Austin developing that reputation and it had nothing to do with the chamber branding it as such. People simply enjoyed the music scene there and wanted to be near UT and a diverse, educated, progressive community.

I also bet that Austin has lots of UT, TT and SMU grads in their population. It doesn't hurt that Austin has 3M either.

I think you are about to hit some nerve endings with your line of thought. We, and this city in general, have spent time, money and forum space aplenty trying to figure out Tulsa's dominant personality so that we might exploit it ....with little success. Give it your best shot!

[TheArtist]

This doesn't really have anything to do about lobbying, but I think Tulsa has done a horrible job at branding it's self.

I would like to see something like Austin's "Live Music Capital" or Branson (yes branson) "Live Entertainment Capital" or Vegas "Sin City" "What happens here, stays here"

The Chamber really need to focus on what makes Tulsa a great place for a young professional or young family to move here, and then go out and market especially to regional colleges. There really is a severe lack of diversity in the education of the workforce in Tulsa. It's pretty much all OSU/OU grads with TU/ORU/NSU and very little out of state schools. Tulsa has great aspects that I think people overlook because they really don't know about them, especially recent college grads. They are more bent on getting to somewhere like Austin because it's all they ever hear about when they could get a similar experience for the most part in Tulsa. The city always talks about how they want to retain college grads once they graduate from area colleges, the easiest way to do that is to make the city and region appealing to people from OUTSIDE Tulsa. The biggest reason a lot of my friends left wasn't because they didn't have opportunities in the city, they wanted to go somewhere that has the influx of people from other places and in Tulsa it's just people moving back from OSU/OU. This is the key that no one seems to focus on and it one of the biggest reasons why this state loses the "best and brightest" from the region. They are focusing on the small problem when they could look at the bigger picture and while going after the "big picture" they can fix the small problem at the same time, instead they're ramming their heads against the wall wondering why we are still not getting anywhere.

The Chamber should focus on diversity issues, might be able to lobby for issues with that regard not really sure what though. I would like the see the city branded as a diverse city where everyone can find their niche from having one of the largest Octoberfest's, Mayfest is a huge arts festival (goes hand in hand with a very strong arts community), a large GLBT population, the historic "Black Wallstreet", and others. It is well known what Tulsa has to offer to people in Oklahoma but once you cross the borders the education on Tulsa drops dramatically.

  I agree somewhat with both you and aqua.  We could use some "branding", but we also need to build up something to brand.

Marketing, we can do a whole lot more to market Tulsas assets without a catchy brand for now.   

I also think we will be able to get more people who like living in a city type environment, once downtown takes off here in a few years. And my big concern about that is making sure we develop as a high quality, very competitive, urban environment.  If done right, that can be our ticket to making Tulsa a lively, diverse, highly desirable city.  We have the opportunity at this stage of our development, and with our new comprehensive plan to create a better urban environment than Austin, Dallas, Denver, etc.  We could be the sh@t we just have to make it happen lol.

[TheArtist]

  Back to the Tourism Taskforce thing.  In another thread I talked about the guy in BA with the great Pontiac collection who was wanting to create a museum, but ended up moving his collection out of state.

I finally tracked him down and had lunch with him and his wife today for they happened to be back in town to pick up another load of items.  I was curious as to why they had decided to move.  The story they told was quite sad actually.  Sad in that they knocked on doors here, tried all kinds of ways to get Tulsa or BA interested.  Tried to see if they could do something with one of the Vision 2025 projects like Route 66, to see if BA would like the museum in their downtown, they listed a number of groups and individuals they contacted, etc. Years passed as they tried and nobody seemed interested. Nobody from the city of BA or Tulsa even came to look at their collection and see what they had. 

Then one day while on a trip he stopped in Pontiac Illinois and was showing someone at one of the places there a book he had written to see if they might like to sell it and mentioned his Pontiac collection (and its more than just cars and Pontiacs for that matter). The lady he was talking to said he should talk to the Mayor.  He then met the Mayor and the Mayor after talking to him for a bit said that they would love to have him open a museum there. That was last August.  The city found a building for them, money to renovate it, funds to move the collection to their city, etc. and the museum will open next month.  That city was like, heck yea it will go great with our Route 66 museum (not that Tulsa has any connection with Route 66) and will certainly boost our Tourism potential (not that Tulsa would ever want that either).   

Ignored in one place, courted in another.  Tourism Taskforce?

[LandArchPoke]

Artist I agree with you in the sense there really is no city like Portland in the central US. Austin is about as close as it comes but they have horrible transit issues and all the other transit systems in place like Dallas and Denver work pretty well they still lack any centralized mixed use developments in the core. Denver in my opinion will get there, it will just take a while because a lot of the downtown development has been spotty in different areas but what they have done is great. Dallas on the other hand is severally lacking on pedestrian friendly areas even with DART.

Tulsa really does have the opportunity to be the gem city in the south central US.

But back to branding. My idea is to brand it about diversity to where it doesn't matter who you are you can find something for you and it's a great long term city to where once you do settle down then you have an amazing city to raise a family. I'll have to reflect more to better explain it.

Aqua you are right, no one does go to Austin because of the branding, but it goes hand in hand. If Tulsa doesn't some how market our self to out of state young professionals then they won't know about Tulsa. Eventually they will with the development of our inner city and word of mouth does spread but why wait when we could start the exposure now. We should stop wasting so much effort on trying to market ourselves to getting kids from the state to stay here, and focus more on attracting out of state kids. Once we have the influx of people from out of state wanting to move here we have also solved the problem of getting in state kids to stay after college because the city will be attracting new diverse people. Tulsa has just as much chance distance wise to attract people from Texas Tech, SMU, Kansas Univ., K State, U of Arkansas as say Austin or other cities. We just haven't marketed ourselves to grab the attention of these people or to even make them want to visit. Once they have visited, then (hopefully) they fall in love with the city and want to move here when they graduate.

[we vs us]

Something fascinating to add:

You may or may not know that, as part of the fall-out from the KPMG survey a few years back (which was striking in how critical it was of how local tourism is run) Visit Tulsa is undergoing a top-to-bottom audit by a destination marketing consulting company.  The audit is still ongoing but the consultants have been at it awhile and have come away with some pretty substantial preliminaries, and they briefed the members of the tourism taskforce yesterday. 

The consultants essentially said that, for a city its size, Tulsa is literally chock full of exceptional, well funded attractions.  Not just casinos; all of our museums, gorgeous architecture, the river, the zoo, the aquarium . . . the list goes on.  Getting around is relatively easy (ex construction), and we are amazingly friendly people.  We are also relatively affordable.  These things came up time and again as they interviewed tourists, meeting planners, and the hospitality and venue partners.

What we are lacking is concentrated and defined marketing effort for the city or the region.  There's no single entry point into the city -- instead we're like "a bowl of spaghetti," [their words] making it very difficult to design and emphasize a gateway point.  Consquently, we may have wayfinding signs, but that's about a fifth of the effort needed to help people get around DT.  Our visitor's center is a desk in the Williams Center whereas other cities our size have visitor centers that are free standing, architecturally significant, and that serve as an obvious clearing house of information.  Similarly, there're no good resources disseminated by VisitTulsa to the hotels and attractions helping to guide people around (I concur; I'm still handing out maps of downtown attractions with the NCAA logo on it).  We don't have any meaningful social media presence and communication between VisitTulsa and its partners is poor. There's very little coordination.  When the consultants interviewed out of town planners and attendees, they discovered that by a huge margin people navigated the city and found shopping, dining, attractions, etc by asking locals.  But that creates an enormous problem because if the locals you use aren't locally literate, you're never gonna know that a given attraction (or store, or restaurant) is there.  "Unless a local tells you you just don't know."

The attractions themselves aren't any better in some ways.  Interestingly, on average, each of our attractions spends around 4% of their budgets on marketing, and most of those efforts stay within the region. That's comparatively a very small percentage.  Overall, close to 75% of the attendees at a given attraction were locals.  The people at the zoo, the aquarium, the Philbrook, the Gilcrease, etc etc . . . all were from the Tulsa area or NEOK.  So we're very much not reaching people in our regional set (AR, KS, MO, TX). Similarly, when people DO come to the city for conventions or events, the vast majority stayed ONLY for the duration of their event.  They didn't add days either at the beginning or end of their stays for shopping or site-seeing or whatever.  They just left.  This is a HUGE loss for our industry, because in other cities our size, those extra day stays are important -- and even more crucial components -- because those days are pure tourist dollars pumped into our economy.

Also interesting was a complaint of the meeting planners who turned us down for conventions and events.  There were standard reasons that we all know or suspect:  not enough plane flights or connectivity; not enough hotel rooms near the convention center; not much to do downtown after 5 (that showed up repeatedly as a comment); but the most interesting one to me was "Tulsa wasn't enough of a destination." The consultants saw this of a piece with their other findings, meaning not that we don't have resorts or a beach or whatever, but that we don't have a strong enough brand (yes, LandArch, a brand) outside of our tight area to help the planners sell us as their host city.  The idea of "Tulsa" outside of OK is stuck in the Route 66 days, and there's not enough awareness to update that image.  Hence, no one really wants to come here.  Or rather, fewer people come here than could. 

There's a lot more info to talk about (for instance: did you know that the largest segment of our tourism and travel industry is corporate, by far? or that most of the travelers to the area AREN'T families with children -- as some of us might perceive -- but singletons on business, and with lots of money to spend); and the final report won't be released till August, but it was very very informative and I can't wait for more of that info to get out. 

[ZYX]

That's very interesting, and makes me wonder, what can we do to attract more tourism? Destination retail? Bustling downtown/inner city? Amusement park? Major updates and expansions to our zoo?

In my opinion, we should consider all of these when trying to attract tourists. We need to try to land some major stores that would attract people from NW Arkansas, southern Kansas, Oklahoma City. A vibrant and exciting downtown is an attraction in itself. It may cause conventioneers to stay an extra day and walk around. It could attract people from more rural areas if they wanted to go to "the city" for a day. A really nice/big amusement park could snag people from all over the region. And a well above average and unique zoo could also pull in people from the surrounding region.

The good thing Is that as we have this discussion, several of these things are happenning. Downtown is expanding at a fast rate, accelerating today with the groundbreaking of one place, and improvements are being made to our zoo.

The biggest question to me is the amount of money to be spent on this. Should it be an iniitiative included in something like a Vision 2035? Or should we leave it up to the private market. Either way, we need a plan to be formed quickly, and to begin marketing ourselves.

[AquaMan]

A destination point. Mall of America is a destination for shopping. The beach is a destination. Mountains are a destination. No amount of downtown or river development, short of these dimensions, will make us a destination. I suppose if we were able to coalesce the efforts into one concept like Deco, Blues, etc that could work but not likely to happen.

Interesting results from the study and they blend with my experience of providing a tourism business a decade ago. The story of the Pontiac museum was not a surprise to me. Go to a bank, or investors, with a novel idea, a cutting edge concept, an idea that  will boost tourism from out of the market area and you'll be met with indifference. Bring them a new concept restaurant and they write you a check. Tear out an old house and replace it with 4 and you're a genius.

So many times I heard the comment "there is no tourism in Tulsa, you are wasting your time" all the while I was signing up people from Chicago, England, North Carolina, OKC and rural Oklahoma. Mostly from a website and brochures. In fact most of my business came from outside Tulsa. Wedding parties, re-unions, conventions, adventurists. My problem was I couldn't get anyone around here to understand that. Even though I got lots of publicity it didn't matter. When the inevitable crunch for capital came and I succumbed to my own failure to get that message across, it merely reinforced their viewpoints.

Lots of work to be done with our own perceptions of our potential. One large success will change attitudes. But when you don't even recognize that the Arena is a success.....

[TheArtist]

  We can't leave it to the private market, because there is no "it" to leave.  The private market has not started this industry here for generations, what would change if we continued on that same path?  Nothing.  It will take the city deciding there is some value and worth to nurturing the birth of this new industry in Tulsa and then deciding what to do about it to build that industry here.   I say industry because you can indeed see that it could be just like another industry like energy or aviation, or high tech and medical, bringing in jobs and money to Tulsa.

 I like the ideas mentioned above like creating a better zoo, but imo you would still have to make it something with a unique twist or very special.  I rarely go to zoos in other cities unless that zoo is known for being special in some way, otherwise... I have a zoo at home, why go to this one?  Aquariums are a little more unique and not as common as zoos and it would be nice to add to ours in some future funding package and hopefully leverage that money to pull in some significant private donations along with it.

 My personal main area of concern is how we waste our history/architectural history in the downtown and mid-town areas.  Those are often starting points for many a cities tourism industry.  You go downtown here and you can't get into the magnificent Churches we have and there are no times as to when you can get in as a tourist.  I have gone to many a city and PAID to get inside churches that are smaller and less interesting than the ones we have here and we have a large concentration of them.  

Example I have told before....
 One time while trying to take photos in one of our downtown churches, (you can only get in during like Sunday services) I snuck in right after a service and was taking pictures, and then about 30 minutes afterwards while still looking for unique shots, found out I had been LOCKED INSIDE ALONE! They had their service then everyone left and they locked the doors!  On a Sunday!  I had to run around to the back of the church and bang on the windows to catch someones attention outside before they had all gone.  The other coincidence that happened as I was in that same church that time was I ran into some other people taking pictures and found out they were Tourists from the Chicago area who had just passed through KC.  They had stopped into Tulsa to specifically check out our architecture and some of the local churches. I remember the lady saying to me "You people do not realize what you have here."  Essentially commenting on how we do not take advantage of the architecture we have tourism wise.

We have big tourism potential just in the Route 66 corridor.  The people with the Pontiac museum were telling me about the tens if not hundreds of thousands of tourists, many from Europe, that each year travel the road wanting to see the attractions and Tulsa is right on the route they pass through.  But we really do NOTHING to snag them and get them to stop as they come through.  Though we don't really have much Route 66 specific items in the city guess we just think "oh they will stop" and see....?  Thats not a tourism industry strategy.  Again an asset we already have that we have not utilized or nurtured and grown over the years.  There should be signs galore along Route 66 touting the attractions we have here, tourism information booths/kiosks at every potential stop on the road inside the city,maps showing where to go "off road" to see other attractions in the city, etc.  That would just be normal procedure in every other place yet its not even on the radar here. 

I could go on with more examples, but I really wonder why Tulsa has not bothered with the Tourism industry? I have gone to many a city our size or MUCH smaller and they have promoted the dickens out of what they have, which was often a LOT less than what we have to start with, and they have brought a lot of money and jobs into the area because they did "work it" and kept adding to what little they had to start with.  Again, why has this not been something that Tulsa has embraced?

[TulsaGuy]

What is the quintessential book on Route 66?  I would love to get a better idea of the road's history.  Thanks!

[AquaMan]

Ok, consider this. Anecdotal so fwiw. I was told by a few insiders that there is a strong "anti" tourism sentiment among influential native Tulsans that is not actively discouraging tourism but merely ignoring what they consider to be poor quality tourism draws. Biking? Good. Running? Good. Drag Racing? Bad. Jet Ski competition? Bad. Festival? Maybe. IOW, judgments are being made as to support by the community based on our preconceived images of their followers regardless of demand.

Remember the response to the Pontiac museum? The perception was that it would appeal to hicks and rednecks. As though their money is suspect. Another example, Mayor Savage didn't want to hear the sound of boats on the river interrupting her morning jog, so, we let proposals for using Zink Lake that involved boating, like a jet ski competition, languish. Imagine, develop the river just not with any boating.

Many opportunities have simply died from lack of nurture or move to other similar welcoming venues.

[Okie2]

What is the quintessential book on Route 66?  I would love to get a better idea of the road's history.  Thanks!

I would say "Route 66, The Mother Road" by Tulsa's own Michael Wallis. When they made the movie "Cars", which is based on Route 66, Michael Wallis is who they used as a consultant.

[Truman]

"I could go on with more examples, but I really wonder why Tulsa has not bothered with the Tourism industry? I have gone to many a city our size or MUCH smaller and they have promoted the dickens out of what they have, which was often a LOT less than what we have to start with, and they have brought a lot of money and jobs into the area because they did "work it" and kept adding to what little they had to start with.  Again, why has this not been something that Tulsa has embraced?" <The Artist

Why not ask Mister Mike Neal of the Tulsa Metro Chamber or visit the spot for the formation of great ideas      http://www.theforge-tulsa.com/
after all you are paying for their actions.


Point about Church architecture and beauty, Toronto has far nicer cathedrals than Tulsa. And, they do not lock most of them at dark.

[Conan71]

So, I guess, Tulsa's "A New Energy" or whatever the branding slogan is was a major FAIL?

[Gaspar]

So, I guess, Tulsa's "A New Energy" or whatever the branding slogan is was a major FAIL?

It's the standard 5 year branding dance around reality.

[RecycleMichael]

It's the standard 5 year branding dance around reality.

+1