SDTMD Overview

Overview

Goals

  • Enhance destination marketing
  • Enhance tourism activity
  • Increase hotel room night consumption/occupancy
  • Compete aggressively with major travel markets
  • Deliver $10.5 million in Transient Occupancy Tax annual savings to the City of San Diego General Fund (Total: $52.5 million over five years)
  • Raise approximately $25 million in assessments annually

The San Diego Tourism Marketing District  is a nonprofit organization consisting of 183 lodging business owners and managers committed to maintaining San Diego’s leadership in the visitor industry. This collaborative effort is modeled after Tourism Business Improvement Districts (TBID) — types of partnerships in which business owners self-assess fees and use them to create demand for tourism. SDTMD’s privately levied, mutual-benefit fee structure is an alternative to increasingly limited public funding resources for tourism, and is allocated for certain categories of expenditure and fixed funding. A minimum of 50% of SDTMD assessments are distributed to the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau (ConVis) to support long-term marketing. Additional funds are competitively awarded to local tourism groups and event organizers that demonstrate strategies and tactics designed to aggressively promote San Diego and capture overnight visitors. SDTMD’s creation as a funding engine for tourism marketing acknowledges tourism’s vital role in the local economy and reflects an ongoing, unified public-private effort to encourage and finance destination marketing.

Location

The Tourism Marketing District is citywide, inclusive of all areas within the city limits of the City of San Diego. A map of the District is included with the San Diego Tourism Marketing District Management District Plan.