(TAN): Florida Senator Bill Galvano has supported the relevance of state tourism marketing amid rising sentiments opposing Visit Florida, reports said.
Visit Florida is a tourism marketing agency that operates with the help of public and private funding.
Galvano reportedly said although the point made by the Visit Florida detractors that regular tourism marketing can be taken care of by local governments and businesses, Visit Florida was required to counterbalance adverse media attention.
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“There are certain things we do have to message and mitigate. For example, whether it’s Zika (an outbreak of the Zika virus in 2016) that cost our tourism industry millions, tens of millions of dollars. You have red tide issues. Algae. Hurricanes. Things that are important to re-message or explain. Just a straight up advertising, ‘Come to Florida,’ I would agree we have private business interests that can do a good job of that on their own,” he was quoted by Orlando Weekly as saying.
Jose Oliva, a Republican from Florida, criticised the role of Visit Florida in a newspaper column earlier this month. He said eliminating the marketing body will ‘hardly’ mean ‘the end of tourism for Florida’. He emphasised that visitors would still come to the state even when promotional efforts sponsored by taxpayers’ money had ceased to exist.
“Florida is the ‘it’ that people want to come see. And there are plenty of private and government marketing efforts underway every day,” he wrote.
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Oliva said that all 67 counties collected the ‘local option tourist tax’ while county agencies such as Tourism Development Councils spent that sum on marketing and other activities to attract tourists.
“In 2019, Florida’s counties collected over USD 1 billion in revenue. You read that right, that’s 1 billion with a B,” he wrote.
Visit Florida’s funding was reduced from USD 76 million to USD 50 million this fiscal year, reports said. The agency reportedly brought down its employee numbers from 135 to 91 in order to adjust with the funding cut. Some of Visit Florida’s past contracts, such as the one with rapper Pitbull which cost the agency USD 1 million, USD 1.25 million to sponsors of the British football club Fulham, and USD 2.9 million to fund an IMSA racing team, have been questioned, as per reports.
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Visit Florida President and Chief Executive Officer, Dana Young reportedly said the agency initiated a USD 5 million marketing campaign following Hurricane Michael to offset an estimated USD 35 million in negative media coverage.
“I think we saw it today; (the media) can’t help but keep putting pictures of destruction rather than printing pictures of hope and rebuilding,” Young was quoted by WGCU News as saying.
