NEWPORT BEACH : Visitors Bureau Relocates Its Headquarters

The Newport Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau, which uses the slogan “The Colorful Coast” to describe the area it promotes, has moved to new digs it hopes will better live up to its billing.

The new office at 3300 W. Coast Highway has much higher street visibility than its former headquarters in a Newport Center office building. The move is symbolic, officials said, of its determination to win more recognition for Newport Beach around the globe.

“We’re starting to break into the international tour market,” executive director Rosalind Williams said, with Britain, Germany and Japan the main sources of overseas visitors.

Williams traveled to New York earlier this year for the tourism industry’s Pow Wow, the annual forum to promote U.S. cities to international travel planners.

A new visitors guide went to the printer last week and will be available soon, she said, and a three-minute video is being sent to destination planners.

The bureau, which gets most of its $700,000 annual budget from a 1% tax on visitors’ hotel tabs, has a growing list of convention bookings through 1996 and into 1997: Planned Successful Meetings at the Four Seasons in June; the Institute for Behavioral Health Care at the Sheraton in October; and the San Francisco-based Western Occupational Health Conference at the Hyatt Newporter in September, 1997.

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Newport Travelers The Newport Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau gets most of its budget from a share of the city’s 10% transient occupancy tax. From a $100 hotel bill, for example, the city gets $9 and the bureau $1. *

Hotel Tax Revenue (in million) ‘91-92: $5.0 ‘92-93: $4.7 ‘93-94: $5.4 ‘94-95: $5.8 ‘95-96*: $5.9 * projected Source: Newport Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau