Cathedral becomes a focus as foreign tour efforts shift to Mexico. (Up Front).

L.A. tourism officials are using the new downtown cathedral to help fill a void in international travel by marketing to Mexican visitors, one segment that has not seen a drop-off in the past year.

With international tourism to the L.A. area off 16 percent, the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau is promoting the nearly $200 million cathedral as a must-see religious, architectural and cultural icon.

"One reason for targeting the Mexican tourist is the sheer size of the market and its proximity," said Patti MacJennett, the bureau's senior vice president of international marketing. "And compared to other international markets, such as the Japanese, it has been more resilient."

Last year, 1.48 million Mexican tourists came to Los Angeles, spending $397 million. That number should hold steady this year or increase slightly. The goal is to increase those numbers by 3 percent to 4 percent next year.

In mid-September, the bureau brought eight travel journalists up from Mexico to L.A. for a five-day visit that had them spending half a day at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. They met with Robert Graham, the artist who designed and made the enormous cathedral bronze doors, Max DeMoss, the sculptor who made the 12 bronze and silver angels that adorn the cathedral's interior, and Lao Garcia, the artist who designed the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, located off the main cathedral plaza.

To encourage more Mexican tourists to visit here, Max Villar, the LACVB's director of the Americas, has been attending trade shows in Mexico City, and promoting the city and the cathedral to wholesale tour operators, airlines executives and travel agents.

"I don't think the cathedral can be sold as a pilgrimage type of thing, like the Vatican or Lourdes," said Villar. "The more I talk to wholesale tour operators, the more I am convinced we need to promote the cathedral as a added-value destination."

The bureau is also rolling out special advertising sections in local Mexican publications that will feature the cathedral.

Jackie Vargas, sales manager for the Holiday Inn in downtown L.A., hopes that the bureau is successful in its bid to bring in more Mexican tourists. In the past, the downtown Holiday Inn has been popular with Japanese tourists, who usually take up about 40 percent of the hotel's rooms every year. Now the Japanese are occupying only 20 percent of the rooms.

The Japanese have been L.A.'s top overseas tourist. But during the first six months of this year, Japanese tourism fell 39 percent to 186,900 tourists, compared with 305,000 tourists for the like period last year.