Hawai'i tourism loses with departure of bowl games
| • | Local bowl games headed to San Francisco, Seattle |
By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer
Sometimes, straying from tradition hurts.
Instead of tempting traditional Christmas Day television audiences with the lure of aloha during doubleheader bowl games, the Jeep O'ahu and Aloha Bowl games are moving to the Mainland, leaving Hawai'i tourism officials feeling like they're the ones left in the cold.
"It is disappointing," said Bob Fishman, chief executive of the Hawai'i Tourism Authority. "But you have to be realistic. It is very hard to make ends meet in these events. People have to realize how hard it is to make the nut to pay the teams."
The Christmas Eve and Christmas Day football games, broadcast nationally from Aloha Stadium, drew less than 25,000 fans last season, an all-time low. While the games generated $3.5 million to $3.7 million annually, about $3 million went to the teams and the rest to pay expenses.
Last season's Aloha Bowl between Boston College and Arizona State was the ninth-most watched game of the year's 24 televised bowls, but organizers couldn't fill the stadium.
Changing tastes, marketing and economics have factored against the success of holding bowl games, said Fishman, who was on the organizing committee for the Aloha Bowl in the early 1980s.
It's a lot easier these days for sponsors to get behind golf tournaments that don't rely on ticket sales to generate exposure, said Tony Vericella, chief executive of Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau.
"It's not as easy as everybody wants it to be," Vericella said.
Gov. Ben Cayetano, who said in 1997 that he saw Hawai'i becoming a "sports mecca," now says too many bowl games may have been the problem.
"It's unfortunate that we're losing the two bowl games," he said. "Having several bowl games in the span of one week probably made it difficult to sustain the high attendace level needed."
There's no direct way to measure how many people come to Hawai'i because they're triggered by bowl games, said Pearl Imada Iboshi, the state's chief economist.
"I think it's much more of an image and marketing impact," she said.
Losing the games is mostly a blow to the state's ego, said Leo Kahane, associate professor of economics at California State University-Hayward, and an editor of "The Journal of Sports Economics."
Cities that want to host Super Bowls, Olympics and other sports events like to tout the idea that games are lucrative to tourism, but research doesn't back up the benefits, Kahane said.
"Most research doesn't show net gains exceeding the costs associated with these events," he said.
The early days of bowl games, when networks paid big bucks to have the contracts, are gone, Fishman said.
"It's a very challenging business now that it wasn't a generation ago," he said. "It's not pleasant to see people going to greener pastures. It's a sign that it's tough to make these things work."
