‘We’ll Always Have Newhall’

The problem Laura Karp faces is as old as the travel industry: how to draw visitors to a community that few people think of as a vacation destination.

As the first paid head of the Santa Clarita Valley Tourism Bureau, Karp is trying to recast the bedroom community 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles as a place where people will spend a night or two and a chunk of their travel budget.

As such, it is what travel professionals refer to as an “emerging destination”--just as Southern California itself was 75 years ago.

Will there ever be a day when a Humphrey Bogart-type will turn to an Ingrid Bergman-type and mutter, misty-eyed, “We’ll always have Newhall,” instead of Paris? Karp thinks it could happen.

One of Karp’s appointed tasks is articulating Santa Clarita’s “story,” the short, resonant description of the community that will make the family buckle the kids into the SUV, fill up the tank and head for Santa Clarita.

High points of that story, according to Karp: “There’s a lot to do here. We’re not just a little drive-through town. We’re a great alternative [to more urbanized destinations]. Families want to travel, and they want to feel safe. They’re a little intimidated by Los Angeles or Santa Monica.”

Then there is cultural tourism, a hot topic ever since Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain, became a destination for culture-hungry visitors from around the world.

“Cultural tourism is really big,” said Karp, “and we’ve got a lot of Western heritage here in the Santa Clarita Valley.”

Fourteen-year-old Santa Clarita has long seen tourism as an important potential source of revenue, according to its first and only director of economic development, Mike Haviland.

Initially, he said, “no one had any kind of mind-set of what tourism is and the economic benefit it can bring to the community. They come into the area and spend their money and then they leave,” requiring far less investment in infrastructure and services than residents do.

Santa Clarita’s tourism bureau is unusual in that it is a city department, not a function of the Chamber of Commerce, according to Los Angeles-based travel and tourism consultant Lauren Schlau, hired to write its three-year marketing plan.

In addition to paying Karp’s $57,000 annual salary, the city budgets about $40,000 a year from its general fund to promote tourism. About $1 million a year goes into the general fund from the city’s 10% transient occupancy tax, or hotel tax.

The bureau also gets $60,000 from its private-sector partners, including local hotels.

Basically, all destinations are sold the same way, according to John Bateman, a Los Angeles-based travel marketer who currently pitches Hong Kong.

Every destination has a dream connected with it, an idyllic picture in the traveler’s mind of its special attractions, Bateman said. “You have to take that dream and match it with the reality in order to sell it.”

For years, Bateman marketed British Columbia. The dream of western Canada was, he said: “Mooses, mountains and Mounties. How can you go wrong?”

For visitors, those images suggested both natural beauty and, thanks to the Mounties, safety, he said.

Security is always a concern of travelers, and never more so than now, post-Sept. 11.

Until recently, Ruth McGettigan was the West Coast marketer for travel to the Cayman Islands.

She said she sold the Caribbean community’s beautiful beaches, friendly people and low crime rate.

“The Caymans have the highest standard of living in the Caribbean,” she said. “If you don’t have poverty, you don’t have pickpockets.”

Santa Clarita also sees itself as rich with natural beauty, with a crime rate to brag about. In 2001, it was named the sixth-safest city in the country, based on FBI crime statistics.

But safety can suggest dullness as well as security. Santa Clarita has a number of negatives to overcome, Karp admitted.

“Because we’re a fairly young city, people don’t know we’re out here,” she said. People who recognize Valencia and Newhall as Southern California communities don’t necessarily understand that they are now part of the city of Santa Clarita.

And, Karp said, “There’s still the perception that we’re way out there.”

In fact, the city is 40 miles from LAX and just 30 minutes from Burbank Airport, she said.

To make the traveling public aware of the city’s relative proximity and such attractions as its annual Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, Santa Clarita is taking a multi-pronged approach. It makes sure its brochures are displayed in local airports and reaches out to other convention and visitors bureaus. It is working with Caltrans for better, more alluring signs along the freeways. And it offers a coupon on its Web site for 20% off rooms at participating hotels.

The 800-pound gorilla among the bureau’s private partners is Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park. Haviland said he realized early on that Magic Mountain was key to attracting tourists.

“It’s like having Disneyland next to you,” he said. “It was a glowing opportunity to build from.”

The park attracts about 3 million visitors a year, Schlau reports. Although that is far fewer than Disneyland’s 12 million annual visitors, Magic Mountain is a major regional draw, Schlau writes, pulling in large numbers of people who live a two- to six-hour drive away or who fly into Burbank Airport.

Karp said the bureau “piggybacks” on Magic Mountain’s big-budget effort to attract tourists by making a modest contribution to its ad campaigns.

Every year, the theme park comes up with a slogan that mentions both park and community: “This year, it’s ‘Play at Six Flags, stay in Santa Clarita,’” Karp said.

Santa Clarita’s identity--its brand, as it were--is still a work in progress, Karp and others agree.

“I don’t have the words for it yet, but I have the concept--L.A.’s backyard playground,” said Schlau.

Karp said that the very diversity of local attractions--the William S. Hart Museum, Castaic Lake, golf courses, multiple locations where films are shot, Town Center Drive (which she compares to Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade)--complicates the task of creating a coherent image for the community.

Not everyone has got the word about Santa Clarita as a tourist destination. Eric Onnen is chief executive of Santa Barbara Air Bus, which runs bus excursions throughout Southern California.

Onnen said his customers--several thousand a year--regularly ask for trips to Six Flags Magic Mountain and its water park, Hurricane Harbor. “Those are known attractions,” he said. The Cowboy Poetry Festival and other newer Santa Clarita venues have yet to catch the eye of his customers, he said.

But Karp is confident Santa Clarita can become a tourist mecca, or a one- or two-night stop on the road to such established destinations as San Diego and San Francisco. Travel by car is up in the wake of Sept. 11, Karp said, and so is occupancy of the city’s 2,000 hotel rooms--almost 5% from a year ago, to more than 83%.

And who cares if Santa Clarita lacks such sure-fire draws as an ocean beach? So does Palm Springs, Schlau pointed out, and people go there in droves, even in the summer when it is hot enough to melt your flip-flops.