Following a Frozen Trail

Paul Rickert, operations manager of Northern Outdoors, and me, Roberta Scruggs, staff writer for the Portland Press Herald, were part of an intrepid band that embarked on an 83-mile snowmobile excursion from the Forks to Sugarloaf on January 23. Also along for the ride were Governor Angus King; Dann Lewis, director of the state tourism office; Scott Ramsey, head of the conservation department's snowmobile division; several members of the Maine Snowmobile Association; and other folks from Northern Outdoors, an adventure resort at the forks.

The trek was born during a year of daydreaming by Bob Meyers, executive director of the snowmobile association. The Governor came along to boost and important - $226 million annually - industry. We all stayed the night at Northern Outdoors wo we could set out at around 8:30 a.m. Outside it was 17 below zero - not with the wind chill, just plain 17 below zero. The metal door handle burned our fingers. The snow crunched under our feet like potato chips. The inside of every nose was icy, and the air was so cold that any deep breath ended in a cough.

Although most of our group was experienced, Dann Lewis had never been on a snowmobile before. Lowell Smith Jr., the state police detective along to protect the governor had not ridden since he was 12 --- 30 years ago. King hasn't ridden much, but his experience with motorcycles was a plus.

Some of our problems were unique, but many were common to beginning snowmobilers, and were the result of the frigid weather. Dann Lewis, Lowell Smith and I all found it hard to see through our helmets. "The first two hours I was tinkering around, trying to get the right balance to keep from freezing my eyeballs off and trying to get rid of the fog", Dann Lewis said.

Like him I was peering through three layers of frost - my glasses, my helmet's visor and the snowmobile's windscreen. I fiddled with the visor all day, sometimes peering through the frost, sometimes enduring the cold blast of air to clear it.

Bundled up as we were though, it seemed almost too warm at times. I had four layers on from the waist down and six - long underwear, flannel shirt, wool vest, sweater, winter coat and snowmobile suit on my upper body. One of the Northern Outdoors guides had to wrestle me into the snowmobile suit and put my big mittens on. I felt like an Apollo astronaut headed for the moon. Dann Lewis too, found himself groping to describe the sense of near paralysis. "I kept thinking, 'I feel like the Michelin man'," he said. "I was sort of walking around like a stiff scarecrow or the Tin Woodsman without any oil."

That stiffness contributed to another major problem - we weren't leaning. Shifting your weight really helps the snowmobile track better, but instead, we were just sitting there - as flexible as a tombstone - trying to steer it like a car. That doesn't work so well.

Did I mention that this trek was 83 miles? Once the trip was over, we could all laugh.......

from: Portland Press Herald January 1998, by Roberta Scruggs, Staff Writer

Dann Lewis - Maine's Top Tourist

The man who now runs the state's tourism office does not pull any punches - but he's getting results.

Nothing annoys Dann Lewis more than the phone calls he gets around Labor Day each year from television and newspaper reporters asking how the tourism season went. The Season, he delights in telling them, hasn't gone anywhere. "The assumption that it's over is crazy'" declares Lewis, director of the Maine Office of Tourism.

The Labor day deadline is a prime example of Old Tourism. Dann Lewis is New Tourism, and he is bound and determined to shake up traditional ideas and attitudes toward the industry that in 1997 had a $5.4-billion impact on Maine. The blunt-spoken Dann Lewis came to the Maine tourism shop in 1995 after a career that included building a resort in the Bahamas, running serveral regional airlines in the Caribbean, serving as chief of tourism in the U. S. Virgin Islands and directing the famous "I Love New York" campaign. In other words, he's a pro, and he doesn't hesitate to rain on the parade of tourist-trade optimism that has largely characterized the business in Maine for most of this century.

Dann Lewis says thing out loud that most Vacationland booster wouldn't whisper in their sleep. Maine has actually been losing ground in the vacation sector for years and probably decades, Lewis says. The industry in Maine has been marked by complacency both public and private. Business owners have by and large been reluctant to reinvest in their businesses, to the point where Dann Lewis says there are motels in Maine's premier tourist towns that he wouldn't check his dog into. With candor like this, it's hard to believe that Lewis is a state government employee - and one who seems to be succeeding.

Not that Maine tourist businesses have gotten a lot of support from the state in the past. Dann Lewis saves some of his most stinging criticism for state government's past leadership, or lack of it, in promoting tourism. "It really was not done on a very consistent or professional basis up until just a few years ago," Lewis says. "There was no plan, no overall vision, and very little funding. Maine consistently ranked nearly dead-last for promotional activity."

It would be easy to dismiss Dann Lewis's comments as self-serving if they weren't so undeniable. The King administration first approached Lewis about comint to Maine shortly after the 1994 gubernatorial election. He turned down the offer only to accept it a few months later after learning that the Office of Tourism job would not be business as usual. With King's support, Dann Lewis says the legislature tripled his budget to $4.5 million - and generated four and five times that investment in new tax revenues from additional tourism. For the first time, the office has set up a professionally managed research-based marketing program with one of the major tourism research firms in North America, Longwoods International. Longwoods has made some surprising discoveries about Maine.

"People in Maine tend to think everyone knows about Maine, and that just is not the case," Dann Lewis says. "If you compare the perceptions of people who have been to Maine and those who have not, and the differences are night and day. Perceptions of those that have never visited are in some cases really bizarre. They think Maine is very cold, very remote, on the Arctic Circle, with nothing to do, and nothing of historical or cultural interest."

Dann Lewis has also learned -and can show- that tourism contributes more than $300 million in taxes to the state's coffers and support the equivalent of 101,000 full-time jobs.

But he also has figures that show "Maine has been steadily losing market share," Lewis disclosed. "If tourism goes up 10 percent in the Northeast and only 3 percent in Maine, we're losing ground." The research indicates that the state has failed to keep up with its neighbors since at least 1994, "although we figure the decline goes back decades," Lewis notes.

If Dann Lewis has done nothing else, he has shown that it pays to market Maine, with a return on investment renging up to eleven dollars back for every dollar spent on tourism promotion. "Before he arrived, there hadn't been a good professional report done by an experienced independent market research firm that difinitively showed those kinds of returns," notes Bob Smith, whose Northeast Hospitality, Inc. bought the old Sebasco Harbor Resort in Phippsburg two years ago. "Once people saw that first report, they were amazed."

With many of Maine's bedrock industries, such as forest products steadily losing ground, Dann Lewis seems to be positioning tourism to pick up some of the slack and move up to the top of Maine's economic ladder.

Given the new candor and new professionalism in Maine tourism, just how successful do Mainers want Dann Lewis to be? Is there such a thing as saturation, too many tourists? How does the state protect the Maine that vacationers come here to see?

Dann Lewis believes that the key to handling more tourists lies in expanding the season rather than expanding facilities. He also has a vision of luring more visitors into interior and northern Maine. "One of our goals is to steer tourism into areas that need economic development." he explaines. In recent years, tourism growth rates have actually increased in interior Maine, although not always without complaints from coastal communities. "In Bar Harbor where business is flat, the people there wanted me to burn in effigy for promoting inland Maine."

Dann Lewis appreciates the issues that rising visitor numbers bring, but he expresses confidence that Maine can handle them. "Frankly, we don't have the infrastructure to allow all those people to come to Maine," Lewis points out, referring to everything from limited highway capacity to limited arrivals by air.

"Dann has really done a wonderful job with bringing Maine up to speed in the tourism business," notes Sebasco Harbor Resort's Bob Smith. "We're making progress and that has helped." In the end, Lewis's willingness to tell the tough truth may be the best thing that has happened to Maine since Mr. Moody built his diner.

from: Down East Magazine - April 1999 by Jeff Clark

How To Keep 'Em Coming - The Dann Lewis Plan

Dann Lewis didn't ease into his new job as director of the Maine Office of Tourism. On his first day, Governor Angus King asked him to figure out how to maximize the value of tourism for Maine. King wanted a written long-term strategy, something the state tourism office had never had before. And he wanted it in three months.

Dann Lewis met his mid-October deadline. He marshalled the advice of business people statewide and crafted a five-year strategy that is likely to drive future discussions of tourism in Maine for years to come.

Dann Lewis's goal in the plan is to boost tourism expenditures in Maine, last officially estimated at $2.75 billion, by 15 percent by the year 2000. Among other things, the strategy calls for making tourism a year-round industry in Maine.

"It's an ambitious major program" said Dann Lewis, most recently an executive at several airline companies. But, Lewis said, "you've got to have a plan to know where you're going."

Dann Lewis admitted that the buggest hurdle over the long-term is likely to be securing adequate funding to further promote and develop tourism. The strategy repeats familiar refrains from past tourism studies, like enticing more tourists to venture inland and into northern Maine and extending the tourism season into traditionally slow months like November and December.

The Dann Lewis strategy has some new twists - ideas that could help Maine market itself without having to dig deeply into state coffers:

• The strategy puts more emphasis on the emerging trend of regional promotion in tourism. The state would continue to project an overall image of Maine. Beneath that marketing umbrella, different regions would market specific activities and packages, and develop a tourism infrastructure in their specific areas.



• The strategy also suggests the state team more often with private businesses, like airlines, car rental companies and tour operators, for more bang for the cooperative dollar. "Virtually everybody in the business should be looking for cooperative dollars to augment their marketing efforts," Dann Lewis said.
  

This is familiar turf for Dann Lewis. He worked on the early stages of the blockbuster "I Love New York" campaign earlier in his career. That, he said, was highly leveraged with private funds from domestic and international airlines, companies like Coca Cola and the Broadway theatre owners guild.

Dann Lewis acknowledges that Maine "won't get that type of scale as New York State, but there are similar opportunities on a smaller scale."

The point is, Lewis said, "we now have a long term plan, and with tourism a proven economic development engine, it doesn't make a lot of sense to ignore it.

"From: The Portland Press Herald, November 1995