Gay and lesbian travel may be a niche market, but it’s big business – and every city and county visitors bureau recognizes it. Competition for a share of that lucrative industry segment is fierce, but Bucks County is well positioned to more than hold its own.

By John Shields

“We’re a hospitality-bound town,” says Daniel Brooks, the architect of the annual New Hope Celebrates gay and lesbian pride festival.Brooks is proprietor of The Wishing Well Guesthouse in New Hope and editor of the New Hope Gazette. New Hope Celebrates, now five-years-old, was born of his concern that not only were the older members of the gay community in New York, where he maintains a second residence, visiting the town less often, but for the under-40 members of that community, “It wasn’t even on the map.”

“I’d mention New Hope to them and they were like … ‘Where?’

”With a marketing background from his days in the New York fashion industry, Brooks has never fully kicked the urge to brand and target. He pitched the idea of a New Hope pride weekend to the borough council. Pride events attract people, and New Hope, despite having a substantial gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender community, had never held one.“I suggested that we bring other people here to celebrate, people who would typically attend pride events in Philadelphia or New York,” Brooks says. “I pitched it as a great way to introduce New Hope to people who hadn’t known of it before.”

And it’s been an absolute winner, according to David West, marketing director for the Bucks County Convention and Visitors Bureau (BCCVB). “The event is a stunning success, and we’re real proud of that,” he says. “New Hope Celebrates brings in a community that appreciates the uniqueness of the town. They celebrate it and they support it with revenue.”

AS IN BILLIONS
With cities all over the country rolling out the red carpet for the gay tourism market, attracting gay and lesbian visitors has become an important component of Bucks County’s own marketing strategy.

“There’s no question that the GLBT travel market is a lucrative one that we all covet,” West says.As in $54 billion lucrative.

According to statistics compiled by The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, gay visitors spend an average of $233 per day; the general leisure visitor, $101. Gay visitors who stay overnight in hotels spend an average of $285 per day. (Overnight stays generate ancillary revenue from shopping, dining and more visits to local attractions.)

The economic driving force behind this $54 billion market is a diverse community that is overwhelmingly college-degreed (82 percent), one in which more than half (55 percent) hold professional/executive/management positions and 76 percent have household incomes above the national average. Nearly a third (30 percent) have household incomes greater than $100,000.Pivotal in tapping this wellspring of discretionary income is an awareness of one more key research statistic, one that Brooks was getting at when he conceived the idea of New Hope Celebrates: 80 percent of gay men and lesbians reported that they are more likely to visit a destination that markets directly to them.“If the GLBT community knows that something is going on and there are things for them to do, they will come,” insists Brooks. “On the other hand, if they hear there’s nothing going on, or don’t hear that something’s going on, they’re more likely to go to places like Provincetown or Rehoboth Beach that they know have a consistent record of gay tourism.

”Early on, BCCVB contributed sponsorship dollars, co-op ads and its purchasing power to New Hope Celebrates. Now, the event has grown so that it hasn’t required the bureau’s financial assistance.

The visitors bureau takes a multi-pronged approach to reaching the GLBT travel market. Each year, it targets three or four gay and lesbian travel trade shows, and it supports Bucks attractions by advertising in trade publications, including Genre, a gay men’s magazine; the New York Blade; and the City Navigaytor travel guide.

“There are now literally dozens of GLBT travel publications, where there used to be only one or two,” West says.

With all forms of print publications in decline, however, Bucks’ web-based marketing has grown increasingly important. BCCVB’s previous executive director, Keith Toler, was instrumental in starting the Web site www.GayBucksCounty.com. The site is tailored to the GLBT community but also links to the bureau’s home page, www.buckscountycvb.org.

“We have great product,” West says. “New Hope, Peddler’s Village, Sesame Place … They’re a natural, huge draw – in the millions in terms of visitors. Bucks County has one of the great branding positions in that it’s a very recognized county name nationally, one of only a few with that claim to fame.”

DRAWING ATTENTION
Ninety percent of Bucks’ advertising is in the metropolitan New York area. At 75 miles away, New Hope is the closest marketable GLBT community to New York. For retailers like Herb Millman, being little more than an hour’s drive from NYC is crucial to the town’s economic well being.

Like Brooks, Millman knows how to actualize ideas. Co-owner of Cockamamie’s, an art deco interior design store, and past president of the New Hope Chamber of Commerce, he believes that caring about the town and not just one’s own business is critical for turning ideas into reality.

The key, Millman says, is creating awareness.

“How do you create awareness? You do what Dan’s doing,” Millman says. “You create events that make people want to come there.”Millman has done that with his semi-annual “Commitment Ceremony” in which couples of all persuasions – straight, gay or otherwise – come for a weekend and renew their, as you may have surmised, commitments to one another.

If what Brooks and Millman do sounds suspiciously like a Field of Dreams way of thinking (“If you build it, they will come.”), rest assured, they know it takes more than that to put foot traffic on the street and open wallets.

“You have to take an aggressive position,” Millman contends. “Nothing is going to just happen.”

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The marketing efforts of savvy, involved individuals like Brooks and Millman, combined with the broader outreach capabilities of the BCCVB, bode well for the hospitality industry in Bucks County. Other specific projects on the horizon also hold great potential. The new Odette’s, for instance, with its hotel, cabaret and club combining “the great elements of New Hope,” as Brooks describes it, promises to be a tourist bonanza.

But potentially even more generative for the region is the imminent redistribution of the hotel tax revenues that fund the visitors bureau’s promotional activities on behalf of the county. A portion of the three percent tax, equating to $400,000, West says, will be dedicated to tourism promotion for the county’s not-for-profit organizations.

Sounds promising, right? But let’s give Brooks the last word on the subject. (Being an editor, he’s come to expect that.) Brooks sees artistic, edgy, tourist-attracting communities like New Hope at a crossroads, and he sounds a cautionary note:

“The real estate market is pricing out those who are the mainstay of the town,” he says. “The hospitality workers – the waiters and bartenders – can’t afford to live there anymore. They’re part of the local color – restaurant workers by day and entertainers at night. If you lose your flavor – and the gay community is a part of that flavor – what else do you have? You’re lost.”

And if a place like New Hope can no longer provide that “dose of diversity” that some straight out-of-towners seek, while simultaneously cultivating its reputation as a gay and lesbian travel destination, then it’s not only the town but Bucks itself that might find its hospitality efforts in need of a … hospital?