Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti signs executive directive creating tourism cabinet to bolster tourism in LA
The directive creates a City of Los Angeles Tourism Cabinet aimed at rebuilding visitor numbers that collapsed during the pandemic, ahead of the 2028 Olympics.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti signed an executive directive in March 2022 creating a City of Los Angeles Tourism Cabinet, an effort to rebuild the city's visitor economy after two pandemic years, according to the mayor's office and ABC7 Los Angeles.
ABC7's coverage frames the timing around the city's push to prepare for major global events on the horizon, including the Oscars and the 2028 Olympics. The mayor's office describes the cabinet as tasked with implementing recommendations from the city's Tourism Master Plan, though the retrieved coverage did not specify how many recommendations the plan contains.
Garcetti was quoted describing the scale of the pandemic's impact on the city: "We know that the last two years gave us the toughest hits that we have ever been dealt," he said, according to ABC7's report, adding that he expected "Los Angeles will be a brand new city reborn in the decade to come."
How far tourism had fallen
ABC7's reporting cited figures showing overall visitation to Los Angeles fell from roughly 50 million in 2019 to about 27 million in 2020, recovering only to around 40 million in 2021. International travel to the city fell even more sharply, from about 7.4 million visitors in 2019 to under 2 million in 2020 and under 3 million in 2021.
What the cabinet does
The retrieved coverage does not fully detail the cabinet's membership or its specific first-year mandate beyond implementing the Tourism Master Plan's recommendations and coordinating the city's approach to its standing as a global destination. Who chairs or staffs the cabinet was not established in the sources reviewed for this account.
The timing of the announcement coincided with the return of an in-person industry event: ABC7's coverage notes the 16th Annual L.A. Travel and Adventure Show took place that same weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center, its first edition after a two-year pandemic hiatus. Travel-industry commentary cited in that coverage, attributed to Frommer's, observed that hotel rates were running cheaper than short-term rental listings at the time and advised booking upcoming trips before anticipated fuel surcharges took hold.
What it signals
The directive reflects a city government treating tourism recovery as an organizational problem requiring a dedicated cross-department body, not just a marketing campaign — a structure explicitly timed to be in place years ahead of the Olympics rather than assembled closer to the event.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by the Office of the Los Angeles Mayor and ABC7 Los Angeles. It restores a story originally published on this site in March 2022; figures are as reported at the time.