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(c) Elliott Publishing.

Useless CVBs?
The Occidental Tourist · December 6, 2000

OK, quick quiz: Which career professional is more useless?

A. A Prozac supplier for the "Up With People" tour B.
Vice President of the United States
C. A convention and visitor bureau employee

Tough call, huh?

CVB staffers are essentially paid cheerleaders, designed to convince you that their venue is the (pick one: #1, greatest, world-renown) location to (pick one: take vacation, plan a convention, assassinate a head of state). Looking for great, hip place to stage a hi-tech business conference? Look no further than, say, Flint, Mich.! (Lots of vacant hotel rooms!) Or the Appalachia hills of West Virginia. (Practically next-door neighbors to Washington, D.C.! And we expect indoor plumbing by 2005!)

Predictably Pollyanna-ish. Oh so willing to hide those pesty warts. You have to actually feel sorry for the CVB husker who has to sell a place that's essentially a hole.

But, the truth is, you can make good use of a CVB as long as you go in with your eyes open. Especially now, with online sites that are actually useful when they're not so annoyingly perky.

Go beyond the obvious, rah-rah crap and you can actually get stuff that's useful: Rental cars and hotel rooms. Concierge service. Or get a quick weather update before you head out to the airport.

In fact, state tourism Web sites receive more than 6 million "hits" and more than 600,000 user sessions each week, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. An average tourism office site receives over 190,000 hits and just under 19,000 user sessions per week, according to the TIA.

At San Diego's visitor site, for example, the average monthly traffic growth rate is growing at 17 percent. The site provides online golf reservations, maps, electronic postcards, weather charts and a promised quick response to traveler inquiries from staff via e-mail. It also provides information in Spanish, German and Japanese. (For the latter, click on one of the flags depicted on the home page.)

And tourism sites are continuing to come up with new wrinkles. PurchasePro.com, a Las Vegas-based business-to-business electronic commerce company, recently announced that it's partnering with chambers of commerce in Los Angeles, Illinois, Long Beach, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Philadelphia. With this, business travelers will be able to handle corporate purchasing needs with local businesses on their laptops via the chamber Web site.

B2B applications are catching on: Hilton Head, S.C.,'s site dishes out more than skinny on golf courses. It provides leads on where local working travelers can find temporary office space and technology, if they prefer not to lug a laptop on the road.

Next week, the Tourist critiques CVB sites of the biggest towns in America. Some stink. Some don't. And e-mail him your findings at tourist@ticked.com, and don't forget your name and city/town of residence.

The Occidental Tourist is a magazine writer in Washington, DC. He writes for Maxim, POV, Capital Style and ABCNews.com. His column appears on Tuesdays. E-mail him at tourist@ticked.com.