Queer tourism campaigns meet mixed results

A Vancouver councilor wants to give tourism Vancouver a 25-thousand-dollar grant to launch a tourism campaign targeted at lesbians in the U.S.

Vision Vancouver’s Tim Stevenson says this would be one way to help out the tourism industry...

"This is the number one destination for American lesbians so we really need to promote what a beautiful city we have how safe it is how open it is and how welcoming it is."

Stevenson says in the US, lesbian tourism is a multi-billion-dollar industry and Vancouver needs to tap into that market.

Last year Tourism Toronto launched a $300,000 campaign with the slogan "Toronto: As Gay As It Gets." The campaign was aimed at Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

Weir says he doesn't have information on how many gay and lesbian tourists visited Toronto last year because of the campaign. He says sexual orientation is not a question Tourism Toronto asks on surveys.

But this year he says Tourism Toronto has upped its marketing budget for gay and lesbian tourists to about $500,000. For 2008, though, the organization has targeted New York City for both gay and straight tourists, with almost identical campaigns.

(Columbia, South Carolina) South Carolina's tourism agency has slapped the wrist of its ad manager and is refusing to go ahead and pay for a campaign to attract gay tourists from Britain.

The state employee who gave the OK for the ad campaign resigned Friday. 

"[He] exercised extremely poor judgment in approving participation in the program,"  state Parks, Recreation and Tourism director Chad Prosser told the State newspaper.

Prosser said the department will require more review in the future.

It was too late to stop the ads that proclaim "South Carolina is so gay".  They've already gone up in the London subway to take advantage of gay pride in the British capital.

But Prosser said Friday the state will refuse to pay the $5,000 cost of the ads.

Atlanta, Boston and New Orleans also are part of the ad campaign. None of those cities backed out.

[When] Sanford learned that his state was being advertised as a gay tourism destination, he ordered a Cabinet-level department head “to do the right thing personnel-wise or process-wise to ensure this does not happen again,” Sanford’s spokesman Joel Sawyer told Q-Notes.
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In the Governor’s office, Sawyer said that the state will not promote itself as a tourist destination through campaigns “aimed at a specific group of people.”

Sawyer said the “so gay” ad should have been “run up the flagpole,” but did not know whether any standard procedures were violated at the time it was approved.

“It defies common sense that someone would sign off on an advertising campaign that controversial,” Sawyer said.

Sorry, Sawyer, but we’ll have to disagree with you on that one. What defies common sense is that a lawmaker would rebuff millions of potential tourism dollars. But, then again, no one ever side the right was in the right state of mind.

Did we mention that Sanford’s on John McCain short-list for the vice-presidential slot?