Visitors' paradise

The tourism industry could be the industry with the most dramatic shifts in the past 20 years.

“One of the biggest changes is the vibrancy of downtown Sarasota and Venice,” says Virginia Haley, president of Visit Sarasota County. “Hotels downtown,” such as the Ritz-Carlton, Sarasota, “helped drive that significant change.”

Developer Kevin Daves started campaigning for a Ritz-Carlton downtown in the mid-1990s. “Nobody in town could understand why we were doing downtown” instead of the beach, Daves says. He opened the hotel — to the backdrop of many doubters — in 2001.