- February 14, 2025
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Just a year over after it opened for business, the 785-room Sunseeker Resort Charlotte Harbor continues to drag in occupancy, not topping 40% in any of the quarters its parent company has reported its earnings. Nightly room rates are also relatively low.
In addition to those underperforming numbers, Allegiant Travel Co., the parent company, has entered into a strategic review that could possibly lead to its sale.
But if you think the prevailing mood is sour after years of delays and two major hurricanes during its first year open for business, you’d be wrong. Dead wrong.
Sunseeker executives, in addition to Charlotte Country tourism officials, remain positive the resort will eventually be a success at bringing in visitors, especially groups of business travelers. The slow start, they say, is mostly weather-related and due to the fact that the resort is trying to break through as a brand.
This year, 2025, the company says, it is already on track to be much better.
“As I sit here right now, we actualized, in Q1 last year, we actualized under 10,000 group rooms. We're sitting on almost 19,000 for 2025,” the president of Sunseeker Resorts, Micah Richins, told investors on an earnings call Oct. 30.
“We talked about the transient and leisure business, but there's nothing that's a greater indicator for us of what the future quarters will look like that is more effective than the group business. And so to be able to tell you that I'm sitting on roughly double what that was last year for the coming quarter really is reassuring for me.”
(Allegiant Air’s media relations department did not respond to an interview request for this story. The Business Observer also reached out to an outside public relations firm that’s done work promoting Sunseeker. The firm was also unable to secure an interview, writing in an email that “unfortunately they aren't available at this time for a phone call.”)
While aspirations have always been high, the Sunseeker’s early history has been complicated by forces largely outside of its control.
At the groundbreaking in 2019, the Allegiant-owned resort in Port Charlotte was hailed as an “unprecedented pairing — a world class hospitality brand with an airline at its heart.”
The idea was that it would be a natural paternship that would draw on Allegiant’s customer base while offering travelers a new destination on Florida’s West Coast.
Trouble started not long after the groundbreaking.
About a year after the groundbreaking, construction was halted for 17 months because of the Covid pandemic. Then, not long after work restarted, 2022’s Hurricane Ian toppled two construction cranes. That shut down construction and caused about $35 million in damage.
The following February, a fire on the site shut down construction again.
The resort finally opened Dec. 15, 2023 — three years later than expected and $225 million over budget.
But even with the resort doing business, it continued to be a drain on Allegiant.
According to the company’s second quarter earning’s report issued July 31, occupancy was 35% for the three months ending June 30 and the company said it expected to see a $25 million loss on the resort for the full year. Of that, $10 million would be covered by business interruption insurance.
Occupancy for the second quarter was down from the “roughly” 40% the company announced in March for the first quarter.
The company also announced in that second quarter earnings call it hired consulting firm Prospect Hotel Advisors “to improve near term financial performance in parallel with developing potential strategic alternatives for Sunseeker,” Allegiant’s President and CEO Gregory Anderson told investors on the earnings call.
“Clearly,” Anderson said, “Sunseeker's financial results are not meeting expectations.”
Following the second quarter earnings report, Allegiant reported in October that occupancy was 31%.
Allegiant is scheduled to release its fourth quarter and annual earnings report, which will give a fuller picture of where things stand, Feb. 4.
While it’s difficult to make a full comparison until Allegiant’s year-end results are reported, data provided to the Business Observer by CoStar shows hotel occupancy for Charlotte County averaged 67.2% in 2023.
Plus, the occupancy numbers don’t tell the full story.
For example, Hurricanes Helene and Milton late in the year led to cancellations that affected occupancy. However, Richins, Sunseeker’s president, told investors in October that about 85% of the business bookings from that time moved to November, December and into the first quarter of 2025.
Also not reflected is the 4.1% increase in the number of visitors to the area since the resort opened, according data from the Punta Gorda/Englewood Beach Visitor & Convention Bureau.
The data compares Fiscal Year 2024 with Fiscal Year 2023 which, because the fiscal year begins October 1, only includes nine months of Sunseeker being open. Despite that, the number of visitors to the area rose to 1.1 million from 986,100 in that time.
At Punta Gorda Airport, passenger traffic improved by 1.2% overall in the year since Sunseeker opened.
But Kaley Miller, the airport’s chief marketing officer, says in an email that there is another data point that shows Sunseeker is attracting travelers from outside the area.
“When we look at mobile location data for the 2024 year, more than 11,000 people left Sunseeker Resort and came directly to Punta Gorda Airport,” she writes.
“While that doesn’t capture everyone who stopped somewhere in between, it’s a good indication that PGD is a transportation hub that Sunseeker guests utilize.”
That Sunseeker is off to a slow start is not a surprise nor is the fact that it is likely to take a couple of years to reach its highest potential.
For one, Port Charlotte is not a huge destination when compared with tourism hot spots like Fort Myers and Naples nearby and Tampa, St. Petersburg and Sarasota to the north. And Sunseeker doesn’t carry a banner like Hilton or Sheraton or Ritz-Carlton travelers are familiar with.
Because of that, it will take time to develop brand awareness and for travelers to learn about the property, says Sean Doherty, tourism director at the Punta Gorda/Englewood Beach Visitor & Convention Bureau.
But, he believes, over time the Sunseeker will reach its full potential.
Time is the key. While Allegiant is positive about the resort’s future and what it will learn from its strategic review, it and the local CVB are working to attract business groups that will rent large chunks of rooms for meetings and events.
And there is a concerted effort to reach customers overseas.
The CVB, for the first time, has hired a full-time marketing representative to work in the U.K. and Germany to introduce potential travelers to the Sunseeker. It has also brought in tour organizers and media from overseas to help raise awareness that, it hopes, will eventually attract visitors.
The results of that work likely won’t be reflected in the numbers for some time. Planning big trips and events take time, after all.
“There's going to be growing pains. That's a good way to put it,” Doherty says.
“So yeah, we're looking forward to that. We're waiting to get that awareness raised among those markets and expect to see that ROI coming in, hopefully, in the next year or two."