SLO County tourism leaders optimistic travel industry will remain strong and continue to grow
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. – San Luis Obispo County travel industry leaders are optimistic tourism will remain strong in the area and continue to flourish in the near future, as well as for many years to come.
"We are coming off a record year in 2022, and we were able to maintain that, those same levels in 2023, so we're really happy about that," said Mark Eads, Visit SLO CAL board member and Embassy Suites Area General Manager. "We expect it to remain strong. With the work that we've been doing with Visit SLO CAL, the marketing the destination, we see the return on that investment, and with those dollars that we're investing, we expect visitorship to remain high for the next five years for sure and beyond."
Visit SLO CAL, the county's non-profit destination marketing and management organization, recently held its 2023 Destination Summit at the Embassy Suites by Hilton in San Luis Obispo.
Attendees at the event, which included those in the local travel and hospitality industry, were essentially provided with a "state of San Luis Obispo County tourism."
According to important industry metrics, tourism in San Luis Obispo County is quite healthy and is plays a pivotal role in the county economy.
"Tourism continues to be a major driver to our economy, currently the number two economic driver in San Luis Obispo County inching up on number one to $2.15 billion economic impact last year putting almost 23,000 residents in this county to work every single day," said Visit SLO CAL CEO Chuck Davison. "It’s helping bring down the taxes for all of us with the TOT taxes collected here locally and tourists spending money here, and the sales tax is collected, that makes it easier for all of us to live here with not such a high tax burden, so we continue to believe that tourism is a major vertical and driver of this economy, and we’re partnering with all kinds of other partners in the market to make sure that it continues to advance."
In 2022, 7.4 million travelers visited the county, helping produce a record-breaking $2.15 billion in travel-related spending, a 13.8% increase from the previous year, and a 6% increase from the previous high in 2019.
"The focus for travelers who come here continues to be this amazing outdoor experience," said Davison. "The weather climate gives us a lot of opportunities for people to travel throughout the year. Our events are definitely growing in this market. I think the other big thing that draws people here is the people, the people the place and the pace in this community is much different than it is again with our neighbors to the north and the south, and I think the authenticity of the way the people show up here and the way they're so welcoming to those who come is what really keeps people coming back time and time again."
Visit SLO CAL, along with many other partners throughout the county, is working on number of ways to help continue to push those numbers higher in the years to come.
In June, Visit SLO CAL implemented Strategic Direction 2026, a strategic planning process that will help guide county tourism through June 2026.
"There's a couple really big initiatives in there," said Davison. "One we’re working on this idea of nomenclature. We really want to carve ourselves out in SLO CAL as something different than the broader Central Coast. People think about the Central Coast of California, it runs all the way from Thousand Oaks to Santa Cruz, and we are different here than our neighbors to the north or to the south, and so we’ve introduced the nomenclature of SLO CAL. SLO Cal is this community that we call home. It makes up to 3,600 square miles of San Luis Obispo County, and so we’re trying to breathe that into this amazing community, Equally with that, there’s a couple really big initiatives that will work on over these next couple years. Workforce continues to be a challenge here, how we get this younger audience, people even in at the high school level to be thinking about hospitality as a career. How do we get people interested in hospitality in the future? Equally, we’re going to continue press into sustainability. This is an amazing destination, but it's an amazing destination because we're super mindful of how this destination is treated, and how we want visitors who come here to respect this place that we call home, so how do we continue to thread that needle of making sure that people understand the audience that we have here, but also the people understand the number of businesses that are really pressing into the sustainable footprint, and trying to make sure that their businesses are helpful to our community and not harmful."
A longer planning process that Visit SLO CAL has been utilizing the past five years is Experience SLO CAL 2050.
"That includes 28 recommendations where we really want to be proactive and mindful of how we make this destination what we all want it to be, rather than being reactive and allowing it to become something that we never intended, so there’s items in there like stewardship," said Davison. "There’s items in there like our events and festival strategy, how we push events into off-peak season, mid-week periods, instead of allowing events to happen during peak times, and have a negative impact on our community. There’s items in there like our work with the airport. How do we continue to expand air service development into this market and create connectivity, not only for visitors who want to come, but for residents who want to travel to see family, and businesses that need to be able to travel as well, and so we'll continue to unpack and evolve and fund those items over the next three year period, again in an effort to make our community even better than what it is today."
Another new program aiming to enhance county tourism is SLO CAL Welcome, a free customer service program that debuted last year.
"It available to everyone in hotels, restaurants, in schools, even in government, so we're real happy about that initiative," said Eads. "By increasing the customer service, that we expect will continue to attract guests and more guests as well. It's really a great and amazing program. We determined back in 2017 we needed to come up with something that would increase our customer service because we did hear from many of our travelers that customer service just wasn't where it needed to be, and so we worked with a company for a number of years, and we just rolled it out last year, but it's about 10 modules that you go through. Four of those are on customer service. There are others, about four modules that information about all the different communities in SLO CAL because it's a very vast county with lots of different activities to do, and there's also an EDI component to that as well, and so we've had a lot of successes. It's called SLO CAL Welcome and I think we've had over 700 employees that have gone through that program. There's a number of businesses that have over 60% of their frontline employees that have completed that as well, and so we expect that to keep visitors coming back."
Looking ahead, Davison said Visit SLO CAL is looking to boost additional tourism experiences such as new events, as well as musical and sporting opportunities.
"There’s a couple things for us in the event space we’re really pushing into partnerships with organizations larger than us, and we’ve seen that work with the World Surf League, and the surf events that we have here in the county, along with things like the Spartan Race, so we think there’s additional opportunity to continue to grow that footprint," said Davison. "Equally, we think that the festival space is a great opportunity for us here in this county, and bringing in bigger meters musical artists, bringing in arts and attractions that allow us to really highlight this destination that we call home, and then we think there’s still some opportunity in sports space. California is going to get a huge spotlight on it in 2028 with sports with the Olympics coming here, and we think there’s an opportunity for us to press into that space and bring some more sporting events to our community that people can enjoy.”
For more information about San Luis Obispo County tourism, click here for the Visit SLO CAL website.
