Oct. 14--The Westin Salishan Lodge planned to launch an East Coast advertising blitz next year. 

But those plans changed Sept. 11. Now the bulk of the Gleneden Beach hotel's advertising will stay in the Northwest. 

"It's a good time for us to capitalize in our region, because we'll find that people are more apt to drive," said Jeff Gehrman, the hotel's director of sales and marketing. 

That's the feeling among Oregon and Portland-area travel officials, who are shifting their marketing and advertising plans away from national campaigns and focusing on people within driving distance. 

The terrorist hijackings have scared many vacationers away from planes. Portland International Airport traffic was down 29.2 percent in September from a year earlier. 

Oregon doesn't make as much money from air travelers as tourism-heavy states such as Florida. But tourism brings about $6 billion a year to the state and employs about 83,000 people. State officials are struggling to keep those figures from slipping, though many travel agencies and other tourism-related businesses have already laid off workers. 

"One of the things that's real important is to get people traveling again," said Todd Davidson, executive director of the Oregon Tourism Commission, the state government's tourism arm. "What may change is not if we travel, but how we travel. Will we be more inclined to take car trips? Perhaps." 

This week, Davidson plans to unveil the commission's Tourism Industry Crisis Response plan, which will shift the state's advertising campaign to a more regional level. 

In its spring blitz, the state will pay about $425,000 for advertisements in West Coast magazines and Western editions of national magazines. 

"Our spring campaign has typically been a national one," Davidson said. "When we look at this spring, we need to look at how are folks feeling now about travel." 

The Portland Oregon Visitors Association has taken a similar tack with its annual Big Deal campaign, which promotes Portland tourism packages for October through May. In the past, it has advertised the campaign throughout Idaho, Oregon, Washington and California. 

But the association this year is concentrating on Washington and Oregon, said spokeswoman Deborah Wakefield. The group will spend about $120,000 on the campaign. 

"We've always targeted our ads for that campaign regionally, but we're doing more emphasis in Seattle and Tacoma because that's such an easy drive or train ride into Portland," Wakefield said. 

Tourists who drive to Portland spend about the same amount of money as those who fly, Wakefield said. 

"People who fly might spend two or three days in Portland, then go to Seattle," she said. "They tend to spend the same amount of time in our city." 

Oregon's tourism sector likely will fare better than other states' because many of its attractions are more regional, Davidson said. About half of all tourists to Oregon travel no more than 300 miles to get here, he said. 

"You're looking at a pretty large percentage of our visitors coming from pretty close to the state," Davidson said. 

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, one of the state's most popular tourist destinations, mainly advertises in Portland and San Francisco, said Amy Richard, the festival's media relations manager. 

"Most of our patrons drive already, so it shouldn't really affect us," she said. 

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(c) 2001, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.