The Greater Buffalo Convention & Visitors Bureau released figures Monday showing that the hotel occupancy tax -- the levy paid by hotel guests -- for a three-month period beginning June 1 was 9.6 percent higher than last summer's revenue.

CVB President Richard Geiger said a number of factors helped to boost revenue in many of the county's lodging facilities. He said an aggressive marketing blitz by Six Flags Darien Lake in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Syracuse and other outside regions attracted many tourists. Six Flags took over the Genesee County amusement park this year and made millions of dollars in improvements.

Linda Taylor, director of marketing at Six Flags Darien Lake, said the park attracted many overnight visitors who opted to stay in neighboring counties. "While we have our own on-site accommodations, we also worked with a hotel booking agent who referred business to about 20 hotels in the Buffalo and Batavia areas," Taylor said. "A lot of our visitors wanted to spend time seeing things in Buffalo and Niagara Falls."

Geiger said the local tourism and hospitality industry also benefited from other special events and activities that attracted more out-of-town visitors than in the past several summers. They included:

• The Monet at Giverny exhibit at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery that attracted about 170,000 people during a record-setting 14-week run. The exhibit was the focal point of a collaborative cultural attractions promotion that helped to strengthen the tourism season.
• A new Buffalo Cultural Heritage Driving Tours promotion launched by the CVB that encouraged visitors to explore the highways and byways of the Underground Railroad, War of 1812 and Erie Canal.
• The Buffalo Sabres' advancement to the Stanley Cup finals which helped hotel occupancy levels in June.
• Spill-over business from patrons of Casino Niagara in Niagara Falls, Ont. Geiger said some gaming enthusiasts stayed at hotels in downtown Buffalo and the surrounding suburbs.

David Hart, president of Hart Hotels Inc. which operates five lodging facilities across the county, said it's difficult to quantify the impact that Casino Niagara has had on Erie County's summer figures.

"You don't always know what brings people to an area. But we do know that a lot of people are stopping at our front desks and asking us the best way to get to the casino," said Hart.

Lodging facilities in Erie County collected $ 1.6 million in bed tax revenues this summer, up nearly $ 141,000 from the summer of 1998. Year-to-date revenue from the tax is up 6 percent over the same period in 1998.

The bed tax is a 5 percent levy imposed by the county and it typically raises between $ 4 million and $ 5 million annually. The CVB receives approximately 53 percent of the revenue. The remaining money is used by the county to pay off debt associated with the construction of the Buffalo Convention Center and Marine Midland Arena.

According to figures provided by Smith Travel Research, a Tennessee-based company that tracks the lodging industry, average occupancy in Buffalo-area hotels in August was 82.2 percent, down slightly from 82.5 percent during a similar period a year ago. However, the opening of several new lodging facilities -- including the Pillars Hotel in Buffalo and the Sleep Inn in Amherst -- increased the number of available rooms in the area by 4.4 percent.

Hart said the upbeat news about increased bed tax revenues must be weighed against what he called a growing disparity between average daily room rates in Erie County and lodging facilities in the rest of the country. He said Erie County's 12-month average daily rate was $ 64.47 and has only been growing at a compounded annual rate of about 1 percent over the past five years. That's about one-sixth the national rate, according to Hart.

He claimed that the region's stagnant rate structure bolsters the argument that government subsidies to some hotel projects have been detrimental to the industry by attempting to create artificial demand for new rooms.

"The bed tax figures offer some encouragement," Hart said. "We're taking baby steps. But we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to our rates."