Ushering in tourism dollars - Westfair Communications

Cathy Sidor credits The New York Times with helping shape her career. “I”™m the cover girl for reading the newspaper,” she said. “It paid off.” Three times, in fact.

The first time was in 1965. It was, she said, “absolute luck” that she landed a job in the community affairs department of WOR-TV in New York City after seeing a help wanted ad in the Times. She had graduated from St. Joseph”™s College for Women in West Hartford, gotten married, moved to Manhattan where her husband practiced law, and was hired by WOR ”“ all in 1965.

“It was one of those dream jobs,” she said. “I was director of community affairs and was involved with a lot of nonprofits, giving them different kinds of visibility, placing them on talk shows or public service announcements or putting them together with sponsors for their benefits.”

She stayed at WOR until 1969, when she became a stay-at-home mom for her two children, who are now in their 30s. Toward the end of 1975, she bumped into her second career-shaping advertisement on Time”™s pages. “I saw an ad for a travel and tourism administration master”™s degree program at the New School,” she said. “It was evening courses and doable” because “the kids were already baby-sitting size.”

The travel and tourism course caught her interest for two reasons, she said. “First, I saw how much difficulty people were having when they came to visit the United States. Living in New York, you saw many more visitors than in most communities and saw the difficulty they had trying to be tourists.”

The second reason “was economic development, which had always been an interest of mine.” Businesses, she said, could attract more customers, including foreign tourists, “if they can get visibility.” With two motivators ”“ social and economic ”“ Sidor began studying for the degree about the same time she started her own dining-room-table publishing business she called Target Tourism.

She produced a 48-page catalogue called Successful Vacations, “capitalizing on the trend in catalogues just starting up at that time,” she said. The annual catalogue was a cross-referenced directory to what she called “learning vacations, such as fly-fishing school in Dutchess County, N.Y., or Vermont.”

About the time she received her master”™s degree in 1983, she had two bidders for her business ”“ Travel and Leisure Magazine and Time Life, “which had a publication in a startup mode, and the demographics of my subscribers matched what they were looking for.” Time Life wanted Sidor”™s list of 80,000 subscribers and the catalogue”™s content and “eventually bought my catalogue to fold into their magazine.”

Sidor hedged on the amount Time Life paid for the catalogue. “The dollars at this point sound so small, there”™s been so much inflation,” she said. But “it was profitable, I covered my expenses and it was a wonderful venture.”

Too tempting

Sidor took a few part-time jobs ”“ six months at the New School tourism department, six months at a Vermont resort ”“ then joined NetWorld in Manhattan as director of communications for its meeting and incentive travel business before joining Manhattan”™s Big Apple Greeter welcome visitor program three years later in 1990. The motivation for the city”™s startup program “was to turn around New York City”™s reputation of being unfriendly,” she said.

She stayed with the city program until 1996, when she happened to be scanning the Times”™ help wanted section ”“ “I was looking for a change” ”“ and saw an advertisement for executive director at the Housatonic Valley Tourism Region in Danbury. “I didn”™t know where Danbury was,” she said. But “in the industry, executive director positions are few and far between; there”™s not a great number of them.”

She was offered the position, accepted it and moved to Danbury, heading the nine-town metro Danbury tourism district until 2003. “The first thing that stuck me was that the people were very proud of their community and very interested in its progress and well-being,” Sidor said. The region was undergoing an economic growth spurt reflected in the number of its hotel rooms. “When I started, there were 1,200 rooms, and when I left, there were 2,600 rooms,” she said.

Those are important figures, because the state peeled off a small percentage of its 12.5 percent room tax to support the nine tourism regions around the state. When Sidor arrived in Danbury, the tax was generating about $600,000 a year that could be spent on building tourism in the Danbury region. When she left, the tax was generating $1.2 million because of the growth in the number and occupancy rates of hotel rooms.

But like Eve in the Garden, that amount of cash proved too tempting for then Gov. John Rowland ”“ before his fall from grace ”“ and the state”™s legislators. They reduced the number of tourism districts from nine to five, grafted metro Danbury into a now 48-community district based in Waterbury and stretching north through Litchfield County that had a total of about 1,000 hotel rooms before Danbury”™s addition, reduced the annual budgets of the remaining tourism districts, and poured the hotel tax money into the general fund.

During her tenure, however, Sidor was successful in touting Danbury as a lifestyle destination, attracting basketball and soccer tournaments that drew 3,000 and 4,000 event visitors to the city, and a nationally televised bicycle race. “When I came there, the average weekend occupancy (at area hotels) was around 35 percent,” she said. “By the time I left, they were running 65 percent to 70 percent annually. The hoteliers needed support on weekends, and that”™s we where developed special events.”

Big business

Sidor took a bit of a break after closing down the Danbury operations in 2004, moved back to her Manhattan apartment she had been renting out and did some freelancing, then in September of 2005, became executive director of the Coastal Fairfield County Convention and Visitors Bureau in Norwalk, which had generally escaped the state”™s hatchet ”“ almost, that is.

The district”™s budget before the 2003 change was $1.6 million; after the change, it was $900,000, even with the addition of 1,000 hotel rooms from the Trumbull and Shelton areas. “We have more hotel rooms and less money,” Sidor said. She calculates that the state collects $183 million in hotel room taxes from the region annually, and that tourism in lower Fairfield County is a $600 million industry “if they eat while they stay here,” with another $600,000 spent at other tourist stops.

“Tourism is big business for the county,” she said. “It”™s a cash cow, but if you don”™t feed it, you”™re not going to milk it.”

Sidor is busy using her small staff ”“ from 12 people before the change to three now ”“ to build partnership packages between nonprofit events like specialty workshops at the Centers for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk and local hotels, working with the private Connecticut Film Center in Stamford to attract filmmakers to the county, and targeting New Yorkers looking for a bit of country. “If you live in New York, the minute you hit the Merritt Parkway, you see grass and trees,” she said, and this greenery translates into “country” for them.

Lower Fairfield County”™s tourism industry, she said, is affected ”“ as most tourism industries are ”“ by the economy, politics and the weather. “When you saw the housing industry getting the wobblies in August and September, you knew there was not going to be discretionary money for people to travel,” she said. The politics are obvious and, like the weather, there”™s not much that can be done about it. As for the weather, “people like to come here for cross-country skiing, but last winter there was no snow. And this summer, it wasn”™t hot enough to drive families out of New York.”

What Sidor is doing, she said, “is providing motivation for travel, trying to make it easier to travel here by putting out new materials for a broader audience.” The bureau “is trying to make it economical for the family that thinks we”™re an expensive place for a getaway.”