Ringleader Martha Sheridan told the crowd that the 1.5 percent estimate – she won’t call it a tax as it is self-imposed and all funds remain in the industry – will quintuple local tourism funding, from 7.5 million $ 40 million in 2019 if the hospitality industry returns to pre-pandemic levels. Nobody can say when that will happen, especially when another variant of COVID is cruising around. But even if the hotel occupancy stays at the current level, the office should roughly quadruple its budget next year thanks to this new “tourism destination marketing district”.
Those funds arrive at a crucial time for the industry, said Sebastian Colella, vice president of hotel consultancy Pinnacle Advisory Group. This applies not just to hotels, but to all Boston companies that rely on travelers’ dollars. Average occupancy of local hotels in 2021 is 45 percent, or about half of 2019, and room rates are about 20 percent lower than before the pandemic. Colella does not expect a full recovery here until 2024 at the earliest.
Perhaps a massive tourism campaign funded by this new assessment can speed that up a bit.
Getting to this point has not been easy for the Boston Tourist Office. You can understand why the office manager Sheridan and her colleagues may take a moment to celebrate.
The concept of a hotel review had been around Beacon Hill for several years and didn’t really lead to anything. It gained prominence when Sheridan’s Group, the state’s largest and most prominent tourism bureau, endorsed it in 2019, not long after they were hired. She argued at the time that the state collects nearly $ 300 million in hotel taxes every year and only remits $ 10 million back to the industry that would be split between the state tourism bureau and local offices like theirs.
It really took the pandemic to get legislative leaders to take the idea seriously, as Saunders Hotel Group’s Dan Donahue explained at the annual meeting. The once booming tourism sector was suddenly hit and thousands of people were unemployed.
Sheridan received the call from her lobbyist Matt LeBretton at 3 a.m. last January, saying that the tourism district language had made it into the final version of an economic development bill passed in the last late hours of the two-year term and became governor’s signature Charlie Baker headed.
Sheridan’s work wasn’t finished. It also needed local approvals – from the Boston and Cambridge city councils – and the support of at least 62 percent of eligible hotels that raise hotel surcharges with 50 or more rooms in the two cities. In Boston, the nightly total would rise from 14.95 percent to 16.45 percent.
Almost 100 hotels have qualified. Sheridan and her cohorts persuaded 70 percent of them to sign up in June. Only one was clearly against it.
Then the politicians came.
Boston Councilor Lydia Edwards took the opportunity. When the tourism sector closed, the city had no emergency funds left over for the industry, at least not immediately. The new marketing district could change that. She said she sees this effort as a way to promote the Boston neighborhoods beyond the usual attractions.
Boston City Council voted in favor in August. Cambridge was also on board at this point. (At the annual meeting, the Tourism Bureau selected Edwards and senior state officials Aaron Michlewitz and Mike Moran for their help.)
Dow, the US travel chief, found that Boston was one of the most underfunded tourism companies of any major US city. The dramatic increase in marketing spending should bring Boston “into the big leagues” alongside New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Similar assessments, he added, helped reverse the trend in places like Memphis and San Diego.
So who’s next in line in Massachusetts? Probably Springfield. Mary Kay Wydra is patiently waiting there. The Greater Springfield Tourism Bureau chief first introduced the idea to the legislature, but she didn’t get very far without Boston’s approval. Hotels in her area are typically smaller than Boston and run by local owners struggling with staff shortages, and she has more communities to service than Sheridan. So Wydra has withheld a campaign to create a marketing district until now, but is hoping one will be formed this spring.
In Boston, Sheridan and her team got a head start by partnering with Colette Phillips Communications and Daren Bascome’s Proverb agency to win a tourism deal with the city funded primarily by federal grants. The campaign with the name “All Inclusive Boston” started in the spring and was extended until the spring of next year and cost a total of about 4 million US dollars.
The goal is to highlight a more diverse city than what can be seen in travel brochures or in films and television – in terms of geography and demographics. The campaign essentially serves as a launch pad for the tourist office’s more ambitious efforts to transform itself and the city. Many tourists only know Boston from the ads for Dunkin, the sketches from “Saturday Night Live” or the films by Ben Affleck.
Tourism officials in particular fear that Boston is being held back by stubborn stereotypes: elitism, arrogance, racism. You want to use marketing to help counteract these perceptions and make the city more welcoming to a wider audience. Or as Donahue put it, we had a bad rap and we need to get back out there and fix it.
Boston has a new story to tell. Now the city finally has the money to say it.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jonchesto.
