Unusual Band of Tourists to Descend Upon Angel Island

Welcome tourists!

​In an example of priming the pump that has nothing to do with John Maynard Keynes, a national group of tourism professionals has arranged for hundreds of folks to take a trip to Angel Island on Friday. It's them: The tourism professionals will invade the beleaguered island in droves and do volunteer work.

With the tourism industry having seen better days -- and Angel Island last year making the dubious list of state parks the governor proposed shutting down -- around 300 tourism industry managers and execs will play tourist themselves in San Francisco this week. Members of the group Tourism Cares, most of whom paid their own way here, will hit up no fewer than 10 hotels around town -- "We have a package we put together," said the group's executive director, Bruce Beckham.

Naturally.

As well as spreading money around our tourist-dependent town, this group of workers from tour companies, hotel companies, travel agencies, and destination marketing organizations will hop on a ferry Friday morning and put in some manual labor. They plan on mending fences, doing some landscaping, and dabbing some paint. There's also an area near the newly restored Immigration Station where "building materials were just strewn around," Beckham notes.

"It's a matter of getting bodies to pile that stuff up so tourists don't have to look at a mess. We want it to look like an organized mess."