We look forward to the Long Beach Peninsula Visitors Bureau’s Guest Directory project every year.  It’s such a great win for our Peninsula business community.

Nearly a decade ago, half a dozen salesmen would sweep through town each spring, make agreements with lodging properties to carry their product exclusively, and then sell ads to local merchants to be in their books.  The quality of the products varied, with smaller properties frustrated by their stapled paper products which quickly soiled and were not replaceable.  Larger properties received binders of information, but they couldn’t match the look and feel of the printing, making them difficult to customize with safety and other information specific to their properties.

Worse, the area information in these directories was often inaccurate, plagiarized and, well, miniscule.

Meanwhile, merchants had to buy ads from each of these companies if they wanted to be seen in each of the local hotel, motel and cottage rooms, which is really smart, targeted advertising.  One restaurateur was spending in excess of $4,500 annually to achieve this goal, and she approached us, along with the Long Beach Peninsula Visitors Bureau (LBPVB) to see if anything could be done.

Thanks to the vision of the LBPVB, and the amazing ability of the Peninsula community to pull together, a plan was hatched and executed.  That first year, the LBPVB made agreements with every single hotel, motel, cottage and bed & breakfast property on their roster to carry only their Guest Directory product.  That volume allowed the organization to upgrade the product so each room would contain a foil-stamped 3-ring binder with custom tabs and nearly fifty pages of information, much in full-color.  At the same time, ad costs could be lowered.

Lodging properties were offered a discounted rate to create customized pages for their books, which were printed on the same paper and using the same inks as the rest of the directory, making each binder a seamless, beautiful piece.  The LBPVB updates the area information annually while we work with merchants on their ads, create the binders, tabs and other pages to create the Directory.

The result is a far superior product, keeping dollars local, with advertisers spending, on average, 20% of what they had to spend to get the same exposure they had in prior years.  Nearly a decade later, ad costs have increased less than 5% and participation has expanded to include vacation rental properties, RV Park front desks, ports, city offices and other key locations throughout the County.

See why we LOVE this project?