Dann Lewis Honored by Top Industry Group

Dann H. Lewis, director of the office of tourism, has been selected as one of the most extraordinary sales and marketing minds in hospitality, travel and tourism by senior executives in those industries from around the world.

Dann Lewis, who has served as tourism director in Maine since 1995, was named in January to the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International "Hot List of Top 25 for 2005." Lewis and the 24 others were selected because of their ability to develop marketing strategies that are truly innovative and clever and that get results. In asking for their picks, senior executives from around the globe were told to submit nominees who best exemplified the set criteria: Whose marketing strategies are truly innovative and clever? Whose companies represent a sales-focused organization? Who gets results? Whose work do you wish were your own?

Submitted nominations were reviewed and scored the Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association Internationals executive committee, resulting in the third annual "Top 25" list.

Dann Lewis has been tourism director for such notable destinations as the Bahamas, the U. S. Virgin Islands, New York (where he originated the famous "I Love New York" marketing campaign) and most recently, the State of Maine.

Congratulations to Dann Lewis!

From: Hospitality Net Industy News - January 2006

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

Dann Lewis - Aiming for the Top

Goal: To make tourism Maine's leading industry

Augusta - Maine's director of tourism, Dann H. Lewis has left a string of success stories in his wake over the years, but now he faces another challenge - making tourism the number-one industry in the state within five years.

Dann Lewis was appointed to head up the state's tourism office by Governor Angus King, who has made no secret of his desire to promote tourism in Maine.

"It's a major element in the economic strategy for the state, " Dann Lewis said in a recent interview. "When I arrived the governor asked me to to prepare a five-year strategy for tourism. One of the major problems, I think, with tourism promotion and development in the past here in Maine is that there's been no consistent effort. There's never been a blueprint around which the industry could rally."

It's hoped the five-year strategy will remedy that. Dann Lewis said "The bottom line is to see tourism grow geographically, on a year-round basis" - and through tax revenue and job creation, "generally increase it's contribution to the ecomony."

Dann Lewis grew up in Massachusetts and in New Hampshire, where he attended Dartmouth College and majored in English literature and mechanical engineering. "After school I went down to the Bahamas and built and operated a small resort, and later wound up as director of marketing for the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism," Lewis said.

From the Bahamas, Dann Lewis went to the U. S. Virgin Islands where he became director of tourism and oversaw double-digit increases in visitor arrivals. Tha job led him to director of tourism for New York state. After leaving New York, Dann Lewis worked as president of several regional airlines from the West Coast to the Northeast. Though he's not a commercial pilot, he piloted seaplanes in the Caribbean islands.

The husband of a respected airline consultant and father of two, now resides in South China, Maine.

Dann Lewis said some areas of Maine, particularly the coastline already enjoy status as successful tourist markets. The new challenge is to market the Eastern and inland areas to visitors, and to stretch the season beyond just the summer months.

Similar efforts have paid off in other states, most notably in New York in the late 1970's when Lewis oversaw the creation of the heart-stopping "I Love New York" campaign. Before the campaign was implemented and promoted on the world stage, there were many areas of upstate New York that did not enjoy a flourishing tourism base and were very much like inland areas of Maine today. Dann Lewis went on to say" I Love New York changed all that, and the prospects here are just as good."

The most recent economic impact studies done in Maine show tourism account for more than 75,000 jobs and roughly $2.75 billion in expenditures, so its importance to the state cannot be understated, Lewis said.

"I would hazard a guess that at the end of the five-year strategy, you'll probably see tourism as the number-one industry in the state," Dann Lewis said.

by: Jonathan Humphrey