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To get a sense of how hotels will attract guests this summer, consider the Lido Beach Resort's “Stock the Fridge” promotion.
Guests at the Sarasota hotel can stock their in-suite refrigerators full of groceries and present the supermarket receipt to the front desk for a $50 credit. “A lot more of our guests are doing less dining out,” reasons Karen Rangel, regional director of sales for the Lido resort and two other Gulf Coast hotels.
The stock-the-fridge promotion is in addition to the Florida resident discount that exceeds 10% from previous summers. “This gives us a competitive edge,” Rangel says.
The Lido's promotion is among the more creative to draw in-state visitors, now the mainstay of Florida's slower summer tourism season. With the economic downturn, there's even a word for this phenomenon: “staycation.”
Gulf Coast hoteliers expect as much as a 15% decline in revenues this summer compared to last year, worsened by the drop-off in groups and corporate business. Any increase in staycationers could revive what might be a slow, hot summer.
In a reminder of the days following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, guests are booking hotel stays at the last minute again. Uncertainty about their own finances means they're likely to book a room only if it's more deeply discounted than last year.
“The bookings are almost a two-day window,” says Jack Guy, vice president of sales and marketing with the Sheraton Sand Key in Clearwater Beach. “It drives people like us crazy.”
There's no doubt that Florida residents are a huge market for the Gulf Coast hotel industry, data from visitors' bureaus shows. For example, 36.5% of visitors to the Tampa area last year were from Florida. “Fort Myers-Naples was the number one market [last year],” says Steve Hayes, executive vice president with Tampa Bay & Co., Tampa's tourism office.
Most hoteliers hope deeper discounts will keep many in-state tourists traveling this summer and occupancies near the same level as last year. “If it stays level with what it was last year, I'll do a jig in the middle of the street,” Hayes says.
One big area of anxiety is Orlando. Because that area has experienced a boom in new-hotel construction, the glut of rooms combined with a decline in tourism has forced hoteliers there to offer below-market room rates. Tourists on a Disney vacation are likely to forgo a side trip to Tampa or Fort Myers they would have booked last year.
Still, Gulf Coast area hoteliers say they may entice Florida residents to vacation closer to home than they did last year, especially if the Mexican swine-flu scare keeps people stateside. They're hoping many Floridians will replace a vacation to Cancun or the Caribbean with one in Naples or Sarasota. “People don't want to completely take that out of their lives,” says Jim Gunderson, general manager of the Naples Beach & Golf Club.
While the unemployment rate has jumped, there is still a sizeable group of professional people in Florida who plan to take a vacation, says John Naylor, a hospitality consultant in Fort Myers. The price of gasoline has dropped by half from last summer, which could provide a boost, he says. Indeed, the high price of gasoline is likely the culprit that drove down in-state travel to Lee County in the second half of 2008.
New ways to attract guests
Hoteliers on the Gulf Coast are dreaming up creative ways attract guests. At Palm Island Resort in Cape Haze, near Punta Gorda, DJ Cutler enticed travel blogger David McRee to measure the resort against better-known Captiva Island on his Web site,
Beachhunter.net. Cutler, Palm Island Resort's director of hospitality operations, is also working with an Orlando rock station to broadcast live from the island and buying television ads on the cable network in the Tampa Bay region. She's hoping to reach new audiences through these media outlets.
At the Embassy Suites in Brandon, you can stay one night and park your car at the hotel for the week at no cost while you ship out of the Port of Tampa for a cruise. The hotel will provide complimentary transportation from the hotel to the downtown cruise terminal. “Everybody's trying everything,” says Jeff Antonaccio, the hotel's general manager. The Embassy Suites scored a reservation within 24 hours of posting the park-and-cruise deal, Antonaccio says.
The success of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team prompted Renaissance Vinoy Resort General Manager Russell Bond to create a package deal for the team's growing fan base. “We've never promoted the baseball package before this year, but we're starting to get a sense that there may be followers,” he says.
At the TradeWinds Island Resorts on St. Pete Beach, the hotel plans a half dozen barbecue beach parties this summer to watch the away games of the Tampa Bay Rays on big screens. “We're trying to do more and more events on property,” says Keith Overton, chief operating officer and senior vice president.
Hoteliers are experimenting with the Internet and social media such as Twitter. “We had a whole discussion yesterday about this,” Hayes says. “It's gotten a hold of everybody.”
If you Google directions to the Vinoy Hotel, for example, a $25 coupon pops up for credit at the hotel. Bond says the Google promotion just started, so it's too early to tell how it's working.
In some cases, hoteliers have abandoned traditional media to attract guests. “Years ago, you would look at the travel section of a large Sunday paper, but that's not the case any more,” says Gunderson. “When booking leisure travel, people have become comfortable doing it via the Web.”
Gunderson's hotel in Naples now works closely with travel sites such as Expedia and Travelocity.
Some tourism officials have established alliances with other travel-related organizations. The Tampa area's visitor bureau has crafted a campaign with Auto Club South, part of AAA, to encourage tourists who come to Tampa to post their stories and photos online for the chance to win a return trip. Promoters hope these stories will generate interest from prospective visitors to the area.
Show me the money
Florida resident discounts will be steeper by 10% to 20% this summer compared to last year, hoteliers say. In addition to simple discounts, Gulf Coast hoteliers are using the discounts to persuade guests to stay longer.
For example, the Sheraton Sand Key participates in a Starwood Hotels program that offers guests a second night at a 50% discount. “We wouldn't have done that a year ago,” says Guy.
Florida residents who stay three nights at the TradeWinds will get a $250 credit from the hotel. “It's for anything you want to spend it on, the spa, the children's program,” says Overton. “We've never had a discount like this before.”
But Overton says it's in the hotel's best interest to keep its Florida customers happy. “Sixty percent of our business comes from a 250-mile radius,” he says. “The consumer expects it.”
At the Palm Island Resort, in Cape Haze, guests who stay four nights get another three nights free. “Right now, my advance bookings are pretty much on par,” says Cutler. Without the discount, she estimates summer reservations would probably be down 20%.
BY THE NUMBERS
In-state travel
Area In-state visitors 2007 In-state visitors 2008 % Annual chg.
Tampa 5,966,560 5,858,250 -1.8%
St. Petersburg-Clearwater 548,757 549,604 0.2%
Sarasota* N/A 161,819
Fort Myers* 120,892 92,741 -23%
Naples-Marco Island 538,071 516,639 -4%
*Data from Lee County is from July through December for both years because of a change in data collection. Sarasota 2007 data was unavailable.Sources: Area convention and visitors bureaus
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