Area’s Summer Tourist Season Warming Up : Visitors: Business at hotels and theme parks is up in July. But overall, the industry remains soft because of the recession and last year’s riots.

After a slow start, the summer tourist season in Southern California is winding up with a bang.

Business at area hotels, theme parks and other tourist attractions picked up in July and has remained healthier than anticipated.

MCA Inc.’s Universal Studios Hollywood set an attendance record for July and is on the way to another record for August. So far this year, the movie-theme park said it has had 4.8 million visitors, up slightly from 4.5 million in the same period in 1992.

Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia also hosted record-breaking crowds in July, and is on a record rate so far in August. The park was already having a “strong year,” spokeswoman Bonnie Rabjohn said. Magic Mountain does not release actual attendance figures. Six Flags is half-owned by Time Warner Inc., which operates seven Six Flags parks around the country.

In July, hotel occupancy in both Los Angeles and Ventura County was up about 7% from a year earlier, according to tourism officials. The first three weeks of August appear to have been just as strong. “That’s much better than we expected,” said George Kirkland, president of the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau. “We would have been happy to see something in the 3% to 4% range.”

Tourism officials say part of the increase is the result of pent-up demand by families that have not taken a summer vacation for several years because of the recession.

And because of the recession, more summer recreation dollars than usual are again being spent by people who live in California or nearby states taking vacations close to home. That has been the case since 1989, the last boom year for local tourism.

Lower airline fares have also brought more foreign visitors to Southern California this summer. But on the whole, foreign tourism has not fully recovered from last year’s riots. The convention business also remains in the doldrums, according to PKF Consulting, a Los Angeles firm that tracks the local hotel industry.

Overall, total hotel occupancy in the Los Angeles area for the year to date is still lagging well behind the first eight months of last year, Kirkland said. He expects the hotel business for all of 1993 to be flat.

“We took such a bad hit last spring that it will be difficult to recover from that between now and the end of the year,” he said. During the April federal civil-rights trial of three Los Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney G. King, downtown hotels saw their business fall off by 9% or more, Kirkland said.

Russ Smith, executive director of the Ventura Visitors & Convention Bureau, has a slightly more optimistic outlook. “I anticipate that hotel occupancy will be up around 2% for the year,” he said.

Visiting the Channel Islands off the Ventura coast is especially popular this summer. Mark Connally, president of Island Packers Corp., which runs boat trips to the islands, said his business is up 10% over the first eight months of 1992.

“What we do is fairly inexpensive compared with a lot of other things,” Connally said. Island Packers charges $21 for a half-day trip to Anacapa Island, up to $215 for a two-day trip that takes in both San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands.

In Universal City, MCA has put between $5 million and $7 million into an expanded marketing effort over the past two years “to overcome the negative rap on L.A.,” especially with foreign tourists, said Ron Bension, president and chief executive of MCA’s recreation group.

Before the riots, Universal Studios Hollywood’s “business was 40% foreign, 20% local. Now, it’s 40% local and 20% foreign,” Bension said.

This summer’s attendance at Universal Studios Hollywood has been buoyed in part by the park’s new “Back to the Future” attraction. Based on the popular movies of the same name, it opened in June.

MCA has spent a total of $300 million in the past three years on “Back to the Future” and other new additions, including its “Earthquake,” “E.T. Ride” and “Backdraft” attractions.

“Those major investments are paying off in the face of a terrible economy and a city with probably as bad a reputation or worse than New York’s. And that’s a sad, sad comment,” Bension said.

Universal Studios Hollywood had 4.8 million visitors for all of 1992 and was the fourth most popular theme park in the nation, according to Amusement Business Magazine, a Nashville, Tenn.-based trade journal.

More than 11 million people visited Disneyland last year, making it the nation’s second-favorite theme park, according to the magazine. Walt Disney World near Orlando was far and away the top draw, with more than 30 million visitors.

Disneyland spokesman John McClintock said Walt Disney Co. has not changed the Anaheim park’s marketing strategy “as a result of any of the events of the past two years.”

The company, however, has opened new marketing offices in the Netherlands and Italy in the past year to promote all of its theme parks, McClintock said, adding that this strategy has been good for Disneyland’s international business.

McClintock said the Anaheim park is having a “very good summer” and business is also up for the year to date. The “most obvious factor,” he said, is the new “Mickey’s Toontown” attraction that debuted in January.

Magic Mountain, which drew about 3.2 million people last year, also has a new attraction this summer that capitalizes on its motion-picture parent. Its “Dennis the Menace Screen Test” opened earlier this year to coincide with Time Warner’s release of its “Dennis the Menace” movie.