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Originally Posted by Crawford
Re. San Diego and New Orleans, totally anecdotal, but I always see lots of foreign tourists in both places. San Diego seems kinda obvious, with Sea World, Legoland, Zoo/Wild Animal Park, great beaches, and the general allure of Southern CA.
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I can speak slightly less anecdotally on San Diego, since my job involves looking at these numbers direct. Historically San Diego has done well with domestic tourism but poorly internationally. For the last year I have data on (2018), only 17% of visitors were international and 76% of those were from Mexico. Only 3.9% of SD's tourists were from overseas, the largest contingent being from the UK.
The Zoo and the theme parks are good domestic draws, but they tend to fall flat internationally when stacked up against Disneyland, Universal Studios, or the Hollywood Walk of Fame. SD's overseas tourist advertising doesn't focus on them heavily. SD's "brand" is mainly focused on the beaches and beach culture, sort of like a more outdoorsy LA. More recently we've been trying to play up a bit of an urban vibe as well with Gaslamp and PB, the idea being you can get the beach experience and big city fun in the same place.
People tend to discount just how much media drives international tourism. If your city isn't appearing in TV, movies, books etc (and importantly, as itself instead of some generic backdrop) no amount of advertising is going draw people in. Which is why you're going to be seeing a lot more glory shots of San Diego in Top Gun 2....