Fall of the dollar means a windfall for San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO -- Antonio and Simona Benvegnu from Milan, Italy, found watching the bay near San Francisco's Fishermen's Wharf recently, have visited the United States four times in the past few years.Erik Nielsen and his family, on their first trip to California, drove up from Los Angeles on Highway 1 before the New Year. Coming from flat Denmark, they found the road's cliffs and hairpin turns more than a bit daunting.Londoners Mary and Adrian Owles and their daughters, Jessica and Caitlin, wanted a ski holiday for Christmas. Their pockets filled with pounds, they found two weeks at Heavenly Mountain Resort near Lake Tahoe cheaper than one week at a ski resort in Europe.The precipitous fall of the dollar -- a decline that picked up steam in 2007 -- has turned the United States into a giant bargain basement for much of the world, especially visitors carrying strong European, Canadian and Australian currencies. And they are coming -- in droves.The United States "is the holiday everyone chooses now because of the exchange rate," Mary Owles said.San Francisco and surrounding areas such as Napa Valley and the Monterey Peninsula are prime beneficiaries. Walk through Fishermen's Wharf or Union Square and it sounds like the Berlitz Academy.That polyglot chorus is the sound of money."The weakening of the dollar really does help us attract an audience that spends a good deal of time and money," said Dan Goldes, executive vice president for strategy and development at the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau. "They not only are able to spend more, but they are able to stay longer and have more extravagant vacations."After falling for years, the greenback went into something of a tailspin in 2007. It fell 7 percent against the Japanese yen and 10 percent versus the euro, the currency of 13 European Union countries. It dropped to parity with the Canadian dollar, known as the loonie, and to half the value of the British pound, much to the dismay of American visitors to London.As a result, record numbers of international tourists are coming to the Bay Area. Despite it great distance from Europe, San Francisco International Airport was the sixth-most-popular arrival point in the United States during the first nine months of 2007. Just over 1 million foreign visitors flew into San Francisco, up 9 percent from the comparable period in 2006, close to the 10 percent increase registered for the United States as a whole, according to the Commerce Department's Office of Travel and Tourism Industries.Not all those foreigners arriving at SFO stayed in the Bay Area, of course. And many international visitors came to San Francisco after entering the United States in Los Angeles or other places. But the port-of-entry arrival statistics are a good indicator of growth in international tourism in the Bay Area.Tourism is the "No. 1 generator of outside dollars" into San Francisco, according to the Convention & Visitors Bureau. Tourists and other visitors spent about $7.8 billion in San Francisco in 2006, the bureau calculates.No exact figures are available on how much international visitors contributed to that total, but the number is clearly in the billions of dollars. Add to that U.S. residents who are switching vacations to domestic destinations because they can't afford to go overseas and San Francisco gets a real windfall.That increasing foreign and domestic demand is fueling a mini-boom in the hotel industry. Bay Area hotels were almost 80 percent booked in September, according to PKF Consulting. In San Francisco, the occupancy rate was 87.6 percent, the highest since the dot-com boom of 2000. The Convention & Visitors Bureau estimates that international travelers represent more than 25 percent of San Francisco hotel bookings.Foreign tourism is growing just as sectors such as housing and construction are turning down, giving the regional economy a huge boost. In the third quarter, San Francisco hotel and restaurant sales-tax revenue jumped 11.1 percent from the comparable period in 2006, according to the HdL Cos., a Southern California consulting firm.For their part, foreigners in the Bay Area are reveling in their newfound spending power."We are very lucky," said Erik Nielsen, a sales manager from Kerteminde, an island town in northeast Denmark.The four members of the Nielsen family had dinner one night at In-N-Out Burger, spending $19 for a meal that would have cost about $40 back home. Those savings helped soften the profound culture shock Nielsen was experiencing. He found Las Vegas "surrealistic, from the Danish point of view not normal." And many things in California, from highways to meal portions, were too big for his taste."That's why so many Americans are overweight," he said.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)