Aug. 2, 2003 - If these are the dog days of summer, the San Diego tourism industry is happy living a dog's life.

For the past three weeks, San Diego County's hotel occupancy rate has ranked the region as the nation's hottest tourist destination.

About 88 percent of San Diego County's 51,300 hotel rooms were occupied last week, higher than any of the other 24 largest visitor destinations in the nation, according to Smith Travel Report, a hotel industry consulting group.

Nationwide, hotel occupancy averaged 73.7 percent.

"If you were looking for a room here last weekend, it was virtually a sellout," said Bob Rauch, director of San Diego State University's Center for Hospitality & Tourism Research and owner of the Ramada Limited in Oceanside.

"You might have been able to find a room somewhere, but you had to look long and hard to find it."

The 1,095-room Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina on Harbor Island was sold out 22 days in July, said Kelly Sanders, the hotel's general manager.

"This is the best I've seen in the five years I've been here," he said. "Our occupancy has been unbelievable."

The soaring occupancy rates pushed rooms rates higher, as well. The average daily room rate here last week was $115, or 37 percent higher than the national average.

San Diego traditionally has high occupancy rates during July and August, but its rate over the past month has been running 2.6 percentage points higher than a year ago while the national increase has been 1 percentage point.

Jerry Morrison, a La Jolla hotel industry analyst, said the performance of the local market is bright spot in a sputtering national economy. "I think you have to look at what's going on in the country," Morrison said. "The economic fundamentals are not well. But the hotel business is San Diego is in pretty good shape."

After a lackluster June, when San Diego suffered from poor weather conditions, the hotel industry has been booming since the July 4 weekend. Good weather, a traditional July surge in vacationers and a desire by tourists to avoid air travel have boosted San Diego's hospitality industry.

"Nobody seems to be thinking about taking big trips," Sanders said. "They don't want to be far away from home."

Along with its huge potential market of vacationers from other parts of Southern California, San Diego also has the weather and entertainment attractions to lure visitors from Arizona and southern Nevada.

"If you have any doubts about people driving here to vacation, just look at the cars coming south on Interstate 5 on any Friday afternoon or going north on Sunday night," Rauch said. "It's bumper to bumper for miles."

About two-thirds of the region's 26 million visitors arrive here by car, according to the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Mike McDowell, executive director of the Mission Valley Tourism Council, said Mission Valley hotel rooms have been packed in recent weeks. Many of those moderately priced hotels cater to visitors arriving by car.

Scott Stratton, sales and marketing director for the San Diego-based Premier Inn/EZ-8 Motels chain, estimated that 65 percent of its rooms are purchased by people driving up without reservations. All 600 rooms in the chain's five hotels in San Diego County sold out Thursday and yesterday, and tonight has been sold out for several days, he said.

"July has been a very good month for us," Stratton said. "Our revenues have increased about 10 percent, and occupancy is up 4 percent from last year."

At SeaWorld, spokesman Dave Koontz said the park has seen a rise in visitors from Southern California the past couple of years with a noticeable dip in the number of international visitors.

At Rauch's Ramada Limited in Oceanside, almost all the visitors arrive by car. The 67-room hotel has been sold out on weekends in recent weeks, demand that has driven room prices upward. Rauch said revenue is running 22 percent higher than a year ago.

"When you've got the amenities San Diego has, people want to come here," he said. "As the weather heats up in Arizona and other nearby spots, people will keep coming to San Diego."

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