With longer life, Visit Florida adds more big responsibilities

Heeding a lesson of the pandemic, legislators added five years to the life of tourism agency Visit Florida, and Gov. Ron DeSantis last week signed it into law. While protecting our biggest industry is just common sense, it took the pandemic to make it happen. 

Though visitor and hospitality jobs got one of every eight Florida paychecks, several years ago legislators grumbled that the state didn’t need to keep Visit Florida’s marketing alive because everyone knows about Florida. 

It’s like saying Coca-Cola and McDonald’s are too famous to bother to advertise. The fact that those corporations have huge marketing budgets shows either they or some legislators don’t understand business.

It was the pandemic that turned the tide for Visit Florida. The industry was near collapse two years ago because nobody was traveling. Jobs evaporated. Once travel began to open up, the public was intensely safety conscious. And Visit Florida was there, marketing safe, secure and rewarding Florida vacations.

Now, at least in Miami-Dade, the industry is close to our pre-covid record highs in visitors, and at much higher room rates. The industry isn’t all the way back, but in ways it’s booming.

We can debate how much of the rebound is due to Visit Florida. The state has many local visitor agencies – the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau is highly effective. Major attractions, hotel associations and large hotel chains also attacked the problem. We could split hairs on which organizations had the most impact.

What would be hard to deny was that all, including Visit Florida, aided the rebound, and removing any of them from the marketing push would have reduced its success.

To their credit, even legislators who had put Visit Florida into a mental waste basket had to admit the value of its work to overcome negative travel images. There was a major problem to solve, and Visit Florida was playing a role in making it happen. 

So legislators added five years to the agency’s life, a reprieve until 2028 to show a new crop of legislators that it’s worth state funds. The figure had been $76 million in 2019, but legislators for the past two years have cut state aid to $50 million, now plus $30 million from US covid recovery funds.

At the same time, the agency has raised fees for partners like hotels, airports and seaports for the first time in 15 years. Officers expect some attrition, but in fact they should be adding members – a paltry 12% of Florida hotels are members. All private partner funding combined now totals only $1.2 million, expected to rise to $1.75 million with the raises. 

For Visit Florida to provide more evidence of its value when seeking state funding, it must be able to show far more private partners contributing far more dollars to the statewide effort.

Those partners need to step up because, despite the current industry boom, Visit Florida should focus now on five vital issues.

One is to pinpoint changes that will hit the visitor industry in the future. Covid is no longer a pandemic but it will linger on, with frequent mutations. Rather than react, marketing should get ahead of that issue to prevent cyclical travel plunges.

A second concern is that covid battered the cruise industry, which will continue to face waves of bad publicity over safety. Each year cruising brings millions of people to Florida, a now-fragile sector of the industry.

Of major concern, particularly to South Florida, is a huge gap that is closing but not disappearing in travel from abroad. Rebuilding foreign travel is a key marketing opportunity.

Zooming ate a huge hole in the meetings business during the pandemic. Can the marketing agency tip the balance on whether some meetings remain remote or come to Florida? How can marketing help build meetings?

Finally, the pandemic and the Great Resignation massively disrupted the visitor industry’s labor force, as people left jobs and disappeared from employee rolls. Hotels and restaurants raised wages but run shorthanded daily. How could Visit Florida use marketing to bring in not just customers but also workers? Labor is a constraint that limits industry growth.

And, one more wild card: the governor has approved Visit Florida’s extended life but not yet the $50 million in a budget that has yet to reach his desk. Would he veto that funding?

Assuming the agency gets the money, unlike recent years it will be able to plan marketing into the future to handle its looming issues. Why become a hotel member if Visit Florida could disappear next year? Guaranteed longevity gives Visit Florida more clout, which is more reason to join.

Florida travel benefitted in one way from the pandemic: US travelers’ ability to go abroad was limited. Florida became an easy second choice because they could get here. But that is changing.

A long-term effort for Visit Florida should be to make Florida not a fill-in for abroad but a top choice. The agency got five added years from the Legislature to do just that.