Sunshine Matters

As the state’s official source for travel planning, VISIT FLORIDA provides visitors with two key resources for discovering all there is to see and do in the Sunshine State.  The first is VISITFLORIDA.com, the most trafficked destination marketing organization website in the country.  The second is the VISIT FLORIDA Magazine, the state’s premier travel planning publication.

The most significant driver for traffic to the website and readers of the magazine is VISIT FLORIDA’s highly-successful domestic advertising campaign, Your Florida Side Is Calling.  For every $1 spent on tourism marketing, VISIT FLORIDA generates more than $177 in tourism spending and $11 in new sales tax collections.

In an effort to better understand the role the website and magazine play in converting viewers into visitors, VISIT FLORIDA commissioned a conversion study designed to measure the impact of these two tools and overlay those results with the advertising effectiveness research to see the comparative impact.  The study revealed that, of the 4.5 million visitors to the website during the survey period (excluding residents/relocators), 78% subsequently traveled to the state – representing 3.5 million visitors.  Among those website visitors who had not decided to visit the state prior to going to the site, 56% subsequently traveled to Florida.  This totaled one million visitors whose direct spending equaled $3.4 billion. Continue reading »

This year VISIT FLORIDA participated in METROPOLL XIV, a comprehensive study of meeting planners and the meetings market in North America, conducted by RRC Associates. The report, which provides a detailed description of meeting planners’ preferences and their perceptions of 40 North American destinations, was conducted over a dozen years allowing for trend analysis of important issues. This was the first time VISIT FLORIDA participated in the study, adding questions to determine how meeting planners viewed Florida as a meetings destination. Continue reading »

The U.S. Travel Association recently held its annual Marketing Outlook Forum in Ft. Worth, Texas.  The forum provides an opportunity for attendees to network with fellow tourism industry representatives from other states and serves as a great chance to learn and gain insight into what experts see as the trends for the coming year.

The following are some of the key takeaways I learned from the conference related to the economy, consumer confidence, business travel, international travel and the changing U.S. population. Continue reading »

Advice from friends and family is the most trusted source of travel planning information.  Knowing this, VISIT FLORIDA created our Share a Little Sunshine platform to engage Florida’s more than 18 million residents in supporting the state’s economy by inviting their friends and family to visit the Sunshine State.

Since launching Share a Little Sunshine in 2010, Floridians have embraced the campaign – sending more than 90,000 invitations to date.  While we are understandably pleased with this level of engagement, VISIT FLORIDA wanted to determine how successful the program has been at actually converting invitation recipients into Florida visitors. Continue reading »

The recently released 2010-2011 Industry Satisfaction Study showed that those surveyed were 81% satisfied with how VISIT FLORIDA is promoting tourism to the state.  This represents a nearly five point jump from the score we received last year and one of our highest scores since 2005.  Nearly 70% rated their overall satisfaction with VISIT FLORIDA at either an 8, 9 or 10 – an increase of 11 percentage points in these three highest categories from the previous year. Continue reading »