Sunshine Matters

Last night was a historic night!  Shortly before 9:00 p.m., the U.S. Senate passed the Travel Promotion Act creating the Corporation for Travel Promotion and providing up to $100 million for international marketing of the United States brand.  It will now go to the President for signature.  Continue reading »

On January 5, VISIT FLORIDA launched a new look for VISITFLORIDA.com.  Rather than set it and forget it, we are now looking at the analytics for January and February to answer the question – did we make the right changes?  It seems we did.  Here’s a look at some of the larger changes and how they’ve affected the site’s numbers: Continue reading »

Yesterday, Governor Charlie Crist joined more than a hundred VISIT FLORIDA Partners and other tourism industry representatives on Miami Beach for a rally to re-launch the statewide, grassroots ‘Share a Little Sunshine’ campaign.  The Governor and I called on all Floridians to help strengthen the state’s economy by sending a personal invitation to out-of-state friends and family, encouraging them to visit the Sunshine State. Continue reading »

On Monday, VISIT FLORIDA released preliminary estimates* of visitors to Florida which show an estimated 80.3 million visitors came to Florida in 2009, a decrease of 0.8 percent**. 

The preliminary estimates continue to reflect that 2009 was a very challenging year for the Florida tourism industry, visits from domestic travelers, international travelers and Canadian travelers as well as in-state travel by Floridians were all down for the year.  Given the economic volatility and consumer uncertainty that marked 2009, the Sunshine State held up extraordinarily well with total visitation to the state down less than 1 percent from 2008. Continue reading »

I’m delighted to say that today, VISIT FLORIDA announced the launch of our new “Your Florida Side” marketing campaign.   It features vibrant imagery that combines both familiar and unexpected Florida scenery with action verbs encouraging consumers to “embrace,” “unleash,” “awaken,” and “release” their Florida side.   To read the social media release that went out today, please visit http://pitch.pe/44428 Continue reading »