Oh, the places tourists go!

For Mother’s Day weekend, the daughters decided to treat Mom with a trip down memory lane in and around Baltimore. One place they had to see during the weekend? The Inner Harbor’s National Aquarium.

“These kids grew up on the aquarium,” Marra said as she and her daughters looked at rays in the underwater viewing area Monday morning. “That was the weekend thing to do.”

While the city is the keystone of Maryland’s tourism industry, promoters said tour book highlights like the aquarium and Maryland Science Center are just the gateway to other options.

“The Inner Harbor really resonates with people,” said Margot Amelia, executive director of the Maryland Office of Tourism. “We’ve found that people are then impressed with all that Baltimore and Maryland has to offer.”

State tourism statistics seem to support Amelia’s claim. Tourism is the fourth-largest economic generator in Maryland, as more than 28 million visitors spent about $11.4 billion in 2006, according to the Tourism Office’s most recent data. All that spending generated about $850 million in state and local tax revenues, and Maryland’s tourism industry employs about 116,000 people.

Attendance at local attractions shows that Oriole Park at Camden Yards and the aquarium still top the itineraries of travelers, tourists and locals alike.

“They’re both iconic attractions,” Amelia said. “When you talk to visitors, they’ll talk about the Inner Harbor, the aquarium and Camden Yards.”

But not all of the highest-attended attractions are so obvious — Muvico 24 at Arundel Mills Mall drew nearly as many people last year as 81 Orioles games, and other smaller venues, such as 1st Mariner Arena, fill the seats.

The 46-year-old arena, with capacities between 11,000 and 14,000 per show, hosts an average of 800,000 guests and 120 events annually, ranging from musical acts such as Jay-Z and George Strait to sports events like the Baltimore Blast and Baltimore Mariners and family shows like “Disney On Ice” and “Walking With Dinosaurs.” In March, the arena was booked for 30 of the month’s 31 nights.

“Our staples are the family shows,” said Frank Remesch, the arena’s general manager. “You’ve got an older building, but it’s in a good niche.”

The following list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it highlights some of the top attractions in the greater Baltimore area as selected by The Examiner staff. The list was limited to specific venues with a paid attendance.

A wealth of destinations, especially in the downtown area, has helped convert one-time day-trippers into tourists who are likely to spend a weekend in and around the city, said local economist Anirban Basu, president and CEO of Sage Policy Group.

“Downtown Baltimore in particular has a critical mass of attractions that makes it more likely … that people will be more than day-trippers,” Basu said. “All of a sudden you can productively spend a weekend in downtown Baltimore and still feel like there’s more for you to see.”

The large number of attractions in the area helps make overall tourism numbers look good, but individual locations might struggle to boost attendance over time as competition increases among tourist attractions in the Baltimore area, Basu added.

For Severn resident Angie Stevens, the competition had less to do with the options available and more to do with Monday’s rain — she brought her father-in-law visiting from Utah indoors to the National Aquarium.

Stevens said she only makes occasional trips to visit Baltimore, and chose between two of its top attractions.

“It’s usually people coming to visit that bring us out here,” she said. “It was between the Maryland zoo and aquarium, and the weather was bad.”

Arundel Mills boasts crowd-pleasing twin bill

An Egyptian-themed movie palace is one of the wonders of the Baltimore world — believe it or not.

Muvico 24 at Arundel Mills Mall entertains more than 2,050,000 moviegoers every year, according to Muvico Chief Operating Officer Hank Lightstone. That number not only puts it on par with Oriole Park at Camden Yards, but also ahead of all its theater competitors. Lightstone said the Arundel Mills location is the highest-grossing movie theater in North America, according to industry firm Renttrack.

“The public just loves the Egyptian theme, the vastness of the theater,” he said. “Twenty-four screens allow us to play all the product. Customers pretty much know they can see what they came to see.”

Another Arundel Mills cornerstone does pretty well, too. Medieval Times’ Hanover Castle drew 244,823 visitors in fiscal 2007, according to marketing manager Rae Ann Cinquanto. The arena’s capacity is just over 1,000, she said, and its attendance falls about in the middle of the company’s nine locations.

“We get a lot of tour travel business, a lot of student groups,” Cinquanto said. “A lot of groups that go to D.C. for the day go to Medieval Times at night, then take the kids back to the hotel.”

Merriweather hits all the right notes

As music venues go, it’s hard to beat Merriweather Post Pavilion’s historic atmosphere.

“You can’t buy history,” said Seth Hurwitz, chairman of IMP Productions, which owns the 41-year-old outdoor amphitheater in Columbia. “It’s a classic place. People come here for the same reason they go to Wrigley Field.”

Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Eagles and others have played the outdoor concert venue located among Symphony Woods. The acts keep coming back, Hurwitz said, because they know their fans want to see them in a unique open-air setting.

“It’s intimate, but it’s also big enough to handle a large act,” Hurwitz said.

About 245,000 music fans saw about 30 shows at Merriweather Post in 2007, seeing acts like Fall Out Boy, Bob Dylan and Kenny Chesney.

The venue recently added video screens, a mosh pit and a sculpture garden, earning a “Best Outdoor Venue” nomination for the second year in a row from Pollstar, a California-based company that tracks concert industry data.

Hurwitz, an event producer, said tourists are drawn to the Baltimore area to visit places that are “indigenous to the region.”

“I love Baltimore because it’s real,” Hurwitz said. “It’s a city with real neighborhoods and real people.” 

Zoo remains valued attraction

You might not believe it now, but for a better part of the 20th century, the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore was central Maryland’s premier attraction.

That changed in the late 1970s with the redevelopment of the Inner Harbor and the addition of other family and tourist spots in the region, said Don Hutchinson, the zoo’s president and CEO. In 2007, the zoo welcomed about 350,000 visitors.

Along with improving the zoo’s balance sheet and infrastructure, one of Hutchinson’s main objectives has been to boost attendance.

“The zoo is still a very significant family attraction,” Hutchinson said. “They see things here they’re not going to see anywhere else.”

Hutchinson said inexpensive ticket prices (the zoo in March lowered prices to $11 for adults and $9 for children), a new member of the zoo family (baby elephant Samson, who was born about two months ago) and warm weather should lead to an attendance bump this summer at the 132-year-old facility.

Hutchinson, who took over as president and CEO in January, said the zoo is also putting practices in place to better monitor weekly and monthly attendance numbers.

Despite its recent struggles, Hutchinson said the zoo remains a valuable part of the region’s tourism landscape.

“All of the old historical cities have had zoos,” he said. “They become a critical piece of the fabric of the city.”

Red-hot Aquarium keeps packing them in

If you’re coming to the Inner Harbor, you’re probably going to the aquarium.

More than 26 years after it opened, the National aquarium in Baltimore remains the Inner Harbor’s crown jewel, drawing both small groups of day-trippers and buses packed with children.

“When we do surveys around the Inner Harbor, they say it’s the aquarium that draws them there,” said Molly Sheehan, the aquarium’s director of communications. “It’s an experience that you really can’t get in other settings. It’s not a restaurant, it’s not a game, it’s a way to touch the underwater world.”

Last year, the aquarium reported an attendance of 1.5 million, down from 1.57 million the year before — the first year its major Australia exhibit was open — and a high this decade of 1.67 million in 2004.

Sheehan said the aquarium’s Atlantic bottlenose dolphins remain the main draw for visitors, followed by the shark tank.

Aquarium executives have begun looking at enhancing vistors’ experiences rather than simply driving more people through the door, adding attractions like a dolphin touch program and putting more emphasis on special events including sleepovers.

“We want people to have a positve experience,” Sheehan said.

Fort McHenry keeps its eye on the weather

Some very modern concerns may lie at the heart of slumping attendance at one of the area’s oldest attractions.

Fort McHenry saw 575,644 visitors last year, according to park ranger Paul Plamann, down from 623,139 in 2006. Plamann said the fort requires little in the way of advertising or promotion due to its historic significance, and he attributed the drop to economic concerns.

“I’ve always said the three business factors affecting visitation are weather, gasoline prices and the economy,” he said. “Normally we don’t really need to advertise much or do much to boost attendance because … this is one of Baltimore’s — even Maryland’s — prime attraction places.”

But Plamann said attendance in the first three months of 2008 is up from the year before, promising a better start going into the prime summer season. February visits were much higher than the year before thanks to a mild winter.

“You could say maybe people aren’t driving long distances, they’re staying close to home. I don’t know,” Plamann said, “We’re going to see how it pans out, but it really comes down to weather conditions on the weekend and gasoline and economy-related things.”

Losing O’s hurt Camden Yards

Where has the time gone?

Baseball fans have been filling Camden Yards for more than 15 years, and the Inner Harbor ballpark is still the retro-modern standard against  which all new Major League Baseball stadiums are graded.

While Camden Yards remains a great place to catch a game, Baltimore fans have reached the point where poor baseball will keep them from the park.

When the O’s won the American League East in 1997 with 98 wins, more than 3.71 million fans filled Camden’s seats. In the last two seasons, with 70 and 69 wins, the Birds drew an average of 2.16 million each season.

From 1992 to 2000, the Orioles consistently drew an average of more than 40,000 fans per game. Without a winning season in the 21st century, the O’s have yet to average more than 39,000.

Sports Illustrated still thinks highly of MLB’s 17th-oldest ballpark, recently ranking Camden Yards the 14th-best stadium out of 30 big league parks, based in part on team quality, ticket affordability, food taste and ballpark atmosphere.

acahall@baltimoreexaminer.com

acannarsa@baltimoreexaminer.com