Tourism in Florida +3.2%!

Florida tourism expected to jump 3.2 percent in '06.

About 3.2 percent more visitors are expected to come to Florida next year, but worries about busy hurricane seasons are keeping some travelers away, the state's tourism marketing agency said Thursday.
Next year's outlook is higher than the national forecast of up to 2 percent more visitors to the U.S. next year, Visit Florida said at its board meeting. Tourism is Florida's biggest industry, with revenues of about $57 billion last year.
Last year, 79.7 million people visited Florida, the most ever and a 6.8 percent increase from 2003. Florida should surpass the 80 million visitor mark this year for the first time, said Barry Pitegoff, the agency's vice president of research. The state may have already exceeded that, but results won't be in until Feb. 15.
If that figure holds, and the forecast is correct, that would mean at least 2.5 million more people would visit the state in 2006.
''If we did not have the challenge of hurricanes, our visitor numbers could be higher,'' said Bud Nocera, president and chief executive of Visit Florida.
The prediction for next year includes the possible effects of more hurricanes hitting the state, Pitegoff said. Hurricanes are the single biggest factor affecting tourists' decision to visit Florida, he said.
The agency is noticing that some tourists are planning to avoid Florida during the peak hurricane months of August, September and October, said Dale Brill, chief marketing officer. That is a change from the past, when Florida's balmy climate attracted visitors during all seasons of the year, he said.
He said the agency will focus more on advertising to the meeting and convention market and less on leisure travelers to counter negative effects from hurricanes
''The reason we're so cautious is that it's very, very difficult to attract the amount of leisure vacations that you need to make up for what one [convention] group delivers,'' he said.
Apart from the hurricanes, economic factors like gasoline and heating oil prices and rising interest rates will also impact travel plans, but they shouldn't keep people away, Pitegoff said. They mostly will make visitors adjust how long they stay and how much they'll spend while here, he said.
''The first thing that we saw when gas prices went to close to $3 a gallon ... was that visitors coming here wanted to spend less on eating out,'' he said.
Still, he expected tourist spending to increase more than the predicted 3.2 percent jump in visitors.
Another concern is that other states and destinations are catching up to Florida in the amount they spend on tourism marketing, Brill said. Oregon spends just $1 million less than Visit Florida on advertising, he said.
The bulk of Visit Florida's $24.7 million annual public budget comes from rental car surcharges. The budget will probably be the same next year, Nocera said.
About 6.6 million people visited northeast Florida in 2004, up about 27 percent from 2003, according to the Jennifer MacPhee, spokeswoman at the Jacksonville & the Beaches Convention and Visitors Bureau. The group estimates more than $7 million visitors may have traveled to the First Coast this year.
The Super Bowl and other events have raised the Jacksonville area's profile which is driving additional tourist traffic, MacPhee said.
Tourists spent about $2.5 billion in 2004 on area hotels, shopping, and attractions. The ripple effect of that spending on the local economy was estimated at $4.3 billion. About 82 percent of travelers in the region were here on leisure and 18 percent on business, MacPhee said.