New Tourism Challenges

LTU Airlines, which Air Berlin purchased in late March, is firing up its summer schedule for Southwest Florida International Airport, with three nonstop flights from Düsseldorf and two from Munich every week. Each of the German airline's wide-bodied Airbuses can carry hundreds of passengers, all of them likely to spend upwards of $100 a day during their visits-which last far longer than the three or four days that most in-state visitors spend here. The Germans will stay for weeks at a time, helping provide the industry's off-season bread and butter.

In Lee County alone, 101,760 Germans converted their euros to dollars and planted them here last year, as did 85,250 visitors from the United Kingdom, 50,500 from Canada and almost 11,000 from elsewhere in Europe. And these make up a small fraction of the 2.07 million total tourists who came to the region looking for a good time in 2006 and laid out $1.34 billion to find it. Most visitors come from the Midwest or the Northeast. Chicago, New York and Minneapolis-St. Paul rank at the top of tourist points of origin, followed closely by Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C., Cincinnati, Boston and St. Louis.

But the figures hide an irony.

Tourism in Southwest Florida is both hugely lucrative and on the verge of crisis, according to some in the business. The trouble has developed from several sources. Competitors are spending a lot more capital to capture the shifting market in the United States and abroad. Man-made factors have diminished the quality of our water and environment. And Southwest Florida's culture, once distinctly flavorful, congenial and accessible, is threatened with homogenization by chain stores and restaurants.

"We've seen our market share erode over the last few years, and that's a major concern to all of us," says Jack Wert, executive director of the Greater Naples Marco Island Everglades Convention and Visitors Bureau. "The tradition of coming to Florida just isn't there anymore in the same way."

Losing allure

Water quality alone has made a herd of environmentalists out of tourism officials who once fancied themselves mere merchants of geography.

Massive releases from Lake Okeechobee that join septic leakage for 60 miles from the Big O to the blue Gulf probably nourish red drift algae and even red tide, which has been occurring more frequently in recent years, killing the urge of tourists who suffer it to return.

"We're one of the only tourist development councils with the money to hire lawyers to look into environmental problems and help stop them," says Fran Myers, a Fort Myers Beach business owner and Lee County Tourist Development Council (TDC) member. "We're activists. We're as concerned as anybody about preserving and sustaining the environment. Not only is it right, it's good for business."

A case in point is the intervention by tourism officials to improve the C-43 reservoir to help control water flow from Lake Okeechobee.

"The first plan had no filtration system," says Mark Crabb, assistant director of the Lee County Visitor & Convention Bureau. "So we said, 'Wait, C-44 [on the east side of the lake] had a filtration system, so why don't we?' And we made that happen. But there's no silver bullet. There are many things we need to do as a community, a county and a region to save our water, and we're working on them."

The problem goes further than water quality, he adds. Tourism numbers for the whole state are down, and he blames small-time funding, $24 million, for the state's tourism promotion arm, Visit Florida.

"Tourism brings in $87 billion to the state, and we estimate a return of $3 for every $1 spent marketing ourselves, but we feel like we're still the redheaded stepchild," Crabb says.

The number of visitors to Lee County has declined, too, and not just because of mid-decade hurricanes. Hotel occupancy rates dropped during the peak season, winter, from 89.1 percent in 2005 to 86.3 percent in 2006. And in the off-season-when marketers both public and private are hell-bent to attract tourists-the drop from 64 percent in September of 2004 (the month after Hurricane Charley filled rooms with residents and workers) to 51 percent in September 2005 to 49.8 percent in September 2006 was not encouraging.

Optimists, however, point out fairly that occupancy rates for December 2006 were up slightly compared to the same month a year earlier-from 62.9 to 63 percent. They predict that new and improved marketing strategies are paying off, and hurricane fears in Europe and at home have finally been vanquished. By March, a VCB official was predicting 2007 would be the best year since 2001.

The price of business

Tourist development councils make their money from so-called "bed taxes"-5 percent in Lee and 4 percent in Collier counties. The tax is charged to hotels and motels every time they rent a room for a night, so hoteliers' patrons foot the bill to protect tourism assets and market the industry, which provides 41,000 jobs in Lee County and about 30,000 in Collier County.

In Lee County, the tax revenues amounted to about $19 million last year, $10.5 million (53.6 percent) of which went to the county's visitor and convention bureau. The VCB's marketing reach ranges from the backs of buses in Finland, to Japanese-language press packets for foreign journalists covering Boston Red Sox pitching phenomenon Daisuke Matsuzaka during spring training, to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., and Tallahassee.

Lee County's TDC, the nine-member board of public and private officials that oversees the visitor and convention bureau's operations, is the only one in Florida to OK the hiring of professional lobbyists in D.C., its members say. It also approves the hiring of VCB representatives with offices in Germany, England and France.

About 33 percent of the bed-tax pie goes to projects that enhance the county's beaches and shoreline; a 13.4 percent bite pays down the debt for Hammond Stadium off Daniels Parkway.

In Collier County, the 4 percent bed tax is on a higher than average per-room rate-$174 compared to $132 in Lee County-that allowed the county to take in more than $13 million in bed-tax revenues last year. It accounts for about $550 in taxes that each resident of Collier County didn't have to pay, estimates Wert. Collier's CVB harvested about $6.5 million of the proceeds from that bed tax for its various enterprises.

Convincing hoteliers that they should be the ones to foot the entire marketing bill hasn't been easy.

"The restaurants aren't paying; it's been looked at and tried, but they don't have to pay. Most of [the hotels] couldn't afford the kind of advertising the state or county can do, and it benefits them the most," Myers says.

A few, however, such as the two Ritz-Carlton resorts in Naples, can afford and conduct high-priced advertising on top of the bed tax.

"We don't rely on [the CVB]; we rely on our brand and property efforts to drive ourselves for our ownership and shareholders," says Bruce Seigel, director of sales and marketing for Ritz-Carlton Resorts of Naples. "What we do rely on are our direct sales, PR, advertising and e-commerce effort, and our direct-mail effort."

Part of the Ritz's business, as it is for the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point resort, Sanibel Harbour Resort and Spa and other big hoteliers, is the meeting and convention industry.

In 2006, according to figures from Lee County's VCB, 78,800 visitors arrived here to attend meetings and conventions, buying 315,200 room nights and spending about $87.4 million. Those figures could be much higher with a bigger marketing and public relations effort, officials say.

But the Legislature might not pump up the tourist-recruiting muscle with the $59 million that local tourism officials hope for anytime soon. "I don't think it's going to happen this year," Wert says.

Outstripping the state of Florida in tourism marketing are Las Vegas, which budgeted $46 million to market itself to the world this year, and New York City, which is looking at a $59 million marketing price tag.

More choices, changing tastes

Florida's competition includes international destinations from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, from the Red Sea to the Black Sea, from North Africa (where Dubai registers powerfully on the radar of upscale European and a growing number of American tourists) to India and Asia (which market heavily in Germany and Britain). And then there are aggressive and well-funded tourist recruiters in California, Arizona, Colorado and British Columbia-to name a few.

Sugar-sand beaches under blue skies are not the only factors anymore. For one thing, baby boomers aren't really like their parents.

"The new baby boomers want adventure," Crabb says. "Also, the profile of our traveler has changed. They're not coming back like they used to every year. They say, 'I want to come back some other time, but next year we'll go to the Grand Canyon or the Northeast or the Black Hills.' We're competing heavily for a group of people who don't want to buy passports."

In the case of international visitors, the region is competing for those who are willing to get passports and suffer through the more rigorous visa requirements of the post-Sept. 11 State Department. But one thing they have in common with their American tourist counterparts is they would prefer to spend less money on an airplane, and to reach their destinations without stopping on the way.