Excellent post, we agree.

I note the lack of Big Conventioneers out on the streets
and in the shops of Philadelphia. After 6pm notice the
foot traffic between Convention Hall and 3rd and Market ........

its not a touristy crowd. Its people heading home.


Joel

__________________

I curse the lost 10 days. Two-thirds of my debate with Chief is gone, lost forever.

Since this has been bumped, let me throw another bit of info at you:

Posted on Tue, May. 31, 2005

We're luring tourists

Trend shows city growing as a destination for foreign travelers

By WILLIAM BUNCH

bunchw@phillynews.com


KRISTOFFER BLOM, a paper-mill worker from Sweden, was on the last day of a weeklong visit to some friends in New York City when they decided to get out of town for the afternoon.

They could have gone anywhere.

But they went to Philadelphia, even though they didn't have much of a plan.

"I don't know much about Philly," confided Blom, 25, earlier this week, as he stood in a steady, dreary drizzle on a long line to go through security for the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. He wasn't sure what else he would do before he and his crew headed back up I-95.

But Blom was part of a growing trend. Once little more than a quick afternoon pit stop for busloads of foreign travelers shuttling from New York to Washington, Philadelphia has seen a surprising surge in international tourists like him - even as nearby cities, including the Big Apple, have struggled in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Helped by a major promotional and advertising push in Western Europe, Philadelphia's ranking as a destination for international tourists - according to a widely used government survey - has risen from as low as 24th among American cities near the start of the decade to 12th place more recently.

When it comes to Western European tourists, the city just cracked the top 10, in the 2003 survey - the latest available. And visitors arriving at Philadelphia International Airport on international flights have risen on a year-to-year basis in recent quarters by anywhere from 9 to 24 percent.

"This summer our booking numbers to Philadelphia have tripled compared to this time a year ago," said Heike Pleuter, who is North America product manager with Meier's Weltreisen, a tour-operator client in Germany. "The East Coast U.S.A. is overall doing very good, but increases to Philadelphia are incomparably high."

To back up the numbers, just take a visit to a popular tourist site such as the Liberty Bell, where you'll likely hear Mandarin or German spoken on a long line, and where a reporter found that meeting foreign visitors was even easier than expected - even if many arrived ill-informed about the city's attractions.

"All I heard was that this bell got rung until it broke, to warn that the Redcoats were coming," said Craig Lines, 45, a New Zealander who was waiting in the security line with a girlfriend. (Actually, the bell cracked sometime between 1817 and 1846, or long after the American Revolution.)

Lines, who has dual New Zealand and Australian citizenship, is on an extended stay in Florida. He was driving to visit Newport, R.I, when he decided to spend a good chunk of an afternoon here. He said they were looking for an Asian or a health-oriented restaurant after seeing the Bell, which he compared to the bells of Notre Dame in Paris that he's seen in earlier travels.

It's not just the most predictable sites that are seeing an influx of tourists from outside of North America. Officials who monitor tourism here talk of the popularity of the Franklin Mills outlet mall with South American travelers, or French visitors seeking coveted tickets to the Barnes Museum.

And other cities that compete with Philadelphia for travel dollars are noticing.

"Places like Philadelphia are cleaning our clock," a Massachusetts state legislator, Eric Turkington, complained in a news article earlier this month, a comment that gained notice down here.

Why Philadelphia, and why now? Experts say it's a combination of factors, including the three-year government-funded marketing campaign in Europe that recently ended, attention to the city's up-and-coming restaurant and cultural scene, and changing travel habits among visitors from Western Europe, still by far the largest market for visitors from abroad.

Fritz Smith, the new director of international and domestic tourism at the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the rise has been fueled by what people in the travel business call "an FIT" - a frequent individual traveler - from Western Europe. These are affluent tourists who may have already visited America once or twice before, so they're comfortable getting off a group tour bus and spending time in places they didn't see the first time around.

"They're more comfortable" in a destination such as Philadelphia, said Smith, a former state of Pennsylvania and Delaware River Port Authority tourism official who started in the Philadelphia job four weeks ago. But to make sure that the city was on the itinerary of these new international travelers, Philadelphia officials had to make their pitch differently in different nations.

A major selling point with the British, believe it or not, is tax-free clothes shopping,

"We'll compare what they'd pay for blue jeans at Franklin Mills versus what they'd spend in London - it's a big difference," Smith said.

German visitors frequently plan forays into nearby Pennsylvania Dutch Country.

But in seeking French visitors, Philadelphia's ads almost exclusively focus on culture and art - the Salvador Dali exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art or the Rodin Museum. The most recent ads in French publications for "Philadelphie" called the city "L'exception Culturelle Americaine," or "the American Cultural Exception," a play on the self-pride of Parisians.

A leading French tour operator - Eric Savournin, of Maison des Etats-Unis - said Philadelphia was smart to market itself aggressively in the years right after 9/11, when rival American cities cut back.

"Philly could thus take the space left by 'too cautious' destinations who dramatically cut budgets," he said, adding that his bookings of Philadelphia visits are up 40 percent this year.

Some have wondered whether America's image problems in much of the world - fueled largely by the invasion of Iraq - are becoming a drain on foreign travelers here. Most experts don't think so, although they do say that much stricter visa and entry requirements imposed since the 9/11 attacks are a concrete concern.

"It's all price driven," said Peter Greenberg, travel editor for NBC's "Today Show" and author of "The Travel Detective: How to Get the Best Service and the Best Deals from Airlines, Hotels, Cruise Ships, and Car Rental Agencies."

That's why Greenberg - who says that flight bookings from Europe to the United States are running about 42 percent ahead of last year - thanks the shrinking U.S. dollar, which has made visiting here a bargain.

Greenberg thinks that Philadelphia can do even better by marketing itself as an East Coast hub - the most accessible base for visiting not only New York and D.C. but also the Jersey shore and Atlantic City casinos. And he said that a revitalized US Airways, now planning to merge with America West, and its competition against Southwest should help as well.

So might doing a better job of marketing an occasionally overlooked cultural advantage - cheesesteaks, like that one that Swedish tourist Blom had when he arrived in Philly this week.

"That was the best thing I've eaten since I got here," he said.

Crime, schools, and transit.