More travelers flocking to Lodi
Visit Lodi! releases travel impact study on city’s tourism income
More people are coming to Lodi and they are bringing their purses and wallets with them.
In 2015, travel spending was up 20 percent and Lodi brought in $185 million in revenue from visitors, according to the 2015 travel impact study recently released by Visit Lodi!.
“We’re very excited,” Visit Lodi! President and CEO Nancy Beckman said on Tuesday. “We’ve always known that there have been increases over the years. Lodi is just continuing each year to see increases in visitation.”
According to Beckman, this is the first study released by Visit Lodi!, which commissioned Dean Runyan and Associates to complete the report last year. It was completed in the fall of 2016 and the most recent numbers available were from 2015, Beckman said. Dean Runyan and Associates is also responsible for tracking the travel impact for the entire state of California, which is done every year and is broken down by county.
“We were just excited to kind of get a base number that we can start tracking,” Beckman said. “We’ll do one of these every couple of years just to see how we are and the trends in visitation to Lodi specifically.”
One of the reasons Visit Lodi! felt it was important to do the report was to show Lodi the value of tourism to the greater community, she said.
“Tourism doesn’t just impact the hotels. It doesn’t just impact the wineries,” Beckman said. “It impacts the restaurants, the attractions, the gas stations and the art galleries. It brings in money and tax revenues to the city, which then, in turn, is spent on things like parks, emergency services and roads, so it impacts really the quality of life for all residents in Lodi.”
According to the study, almost a million people visit Lodi annually, with a projected 400,000 overnight visitors and 560,000 day visitors. The overnight visitors spent $106.1 million annually while day visitors spent $79.3 million annually, according to the study.
“We’re known as a wine country destination, so we have a tourism commodity that people want to experience,” Beckman said. “We have a beautiful community, nice weather, amazing wines and beautiful wineries. We have activities like cycling, kayaking and museums, a beautiful downtown and great restaurants, all the things that make a really neat tourism package.”
In addition to having various tourist attractions, Beckman said marketing and promoting Lodi as a tourism destination is another important part of drawing visitors. In an effort to draw in more tourists and bring in more revenue in the coming years, Visit Lodi! has increased its advertising budget and is focusing the majority of its resources in the Bay Area and Northern California region, which is the city’s largest overnight marketing audience, Beckman said.
They’re also taking advantage of new technology that is available.
“We know that the majority
of visitors do a high percentage of their research online so we’re making sure that we are taking advantage of digital technology,” she said.
According to Beckman, a lot of Visit Lodi’s ads are digital and mobile in nature. She said they are also taking advantage of things such as geo fencing, targeting and retargeting, content promotion and video.
“We’re are really trying to reach the consumer where they’re at,” she said.
Last fall Visit Lodi! hired a public relations company that had been working with destination marketing organizations for over 30 years. The company brought in 20 national travel writers from all over the country to Lodi for
three days and took them on multiple tours. The tours included wine tasting, paddling, cycling and Downtown shopping. From those tours, Lodi was able to garner 34 articles or broadcasts well known publications such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, NPR and AARP.
Beckman said if Visit Lodi! had paid for the publicity that it would have cost $1.1 million. The plan is to do the tour again next year, Beckman said.
“All of those things really contributed to the uptick in the number of visitors that we’ve seen, and we believe will continue to assist us to bring in even more,” she said of Visit Lodi’s efforts.