Healthy competition: working together to snag major events like the Super Bowl, while competing with each other as destinations, has helped South Florida's counties post record tourism numbers—so far. But a continued competitive approach may mean forsaking more repeat visitors

South Florida CEO, June, 2004 by Mike Seemuth

The "bed taxes" they collect from hotels tend to make South Florida's three counties strange bedfellows in regional tourism promotion. Because the hotelroom sales taxes must be spent on boosting tourism in the county where they're collected, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach are unlikely allies when it comes to luring more tourists to the tri-county region. Despite its subdivided bed-tax base, however, South Florida can--and should--show cohesion on the hospitality-promotion front.

"There is certainly a lot of business that we have marketed regionally," says Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau. For example, says Grossman, the Greater Fort Lauderdale and the Greater Miami convention and visitors bureaus both work with the Seminole Tribe to promote excursions into the Everglades. The two counties' convention bureaus have also joined forces to support a sister-city style cultural exchange program called Jamaica Bridges, designed to spur travel between that Caribbean nation and South Florida. "We've got a lot of new flights coming from Jamaica now." says Grossman.

Perhaps the most successful example of regional tourism promotion has been South Florida's Super Bowl bids. The area has hosted eight Super Bowls, and in 2007 will host its ninth at Pro Player Stadium in northern Miami-Dade County. "When the three of us go to bid a Super Bowl, we don't bid it as Miami, we bid it as South Florida," says Stuart Blumberg, president and CEO of the Greater Miami and the Beaches Hotel Association. "There's only [a certain] amount of rooms available in Miami for those events.... One of the teams is housed in Broward and one in Dade." Other regional promotion efforts have included the Breeder's Cup at Gulfstream Racetrack in Hallandale, the Latin Grammys in downtown Miami, and bids for the baseball All-Star Game and World Cup soccer games. "It's very much majorevent driven." Blumberg says.

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Statewide tourism promoter Visit Florida has also worked to create some regional cohesion. The organization often corrals together tourism promoters from different South Florida counties in common exhibition spaces at trade shows for the travel industry. Rozeta Rad, director of the Hollywood Office of Tourism (a division of the Greater Hollywood Chamber of Commerce), says she expects to work with tourism promoters from other parts of South Florida "when we travel with Visit Florida. We do presentations together."

Supported by a statewide tax on car rentals and by corporate contributions, Visit Florida also does cooperative advertising with tourism agencies around the state. For example, the cost of a recent New York Times advertisement featuring several hotels in Palm Beach County was split between Visit Florida, the Palm Beach County convention bureau and car rental company Hertz. While that kind of co-op advertising hardly qualifies as a tri-county promotion of South Florida, it achieves one of the goals of regional promotion--to supplement individual counties' bed tax money with other funds.

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In a similar vein, tourism agencies in South Florida piggyback on the marketing strength of heavily advertised, highly regarded hotel chains such as Marriott, Ritz-Carlton and Westin, all of which have multiple hotels in South Florida, and operate in more than one of the region's three counties.

Still, South Florida's tourism agencies have relatively few marketing dollars; the ad budgets of all South Florida tourism agencies combined is tiny compared with the advertising dollars spent to sell such destinations as Orlando and Las Vegas. So there is certainly an argument for using those dollars collectively, rather than individually. A similar struggle has gone on for years between the City of Miami Beach and the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, which uses bed-tax dollars from Miami Beach and other municipalities to promote the entire county. That argument was largely settled by a recent study, commissioned by the City of Miami Beach, which showed that marketing Greater Miami was a more efficient use of tourist-tax dollars than marketing individual cities. "The visitor doesn't distinguish political boundaries," says GMCVB president Bill Talbert. "They have a sense of place.... The area-wide marketing approach was the best approach, and the one that is used everywhere else."

Another key argument for a broad marketing approach is what you might call the variety factor. As Miami city commissioner Johnny Winton puts it, "If I'm a routine traveler, and I want to go someplace, if we were only Miami Beach, or if we were only the City of Miami, and that was all we had to offer, we would get that traveler once, maybe twice, maybe three times. But by the fourth time, it's like 'Been there, done that.'" If you package the region as a destination, he argues, "they can't run out of interesting things to do in South Florida."

Nonetheless, says Talbert, the three counties will continue to compete--sometimes rancorously--as destinations for the foreseeable future. "South Florida doesn't have brand value, particularly the further away you get," he says, while names like Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach do. And competition has plenty of benefits. Rivalries between convention centers, hotels, restaurants and attractions in South Florida can support tourism by encouraging high standards of local hospitality.