Construction, State Efforts Bring Biz Meetings To Florida

<B> Construction, State Efforts Bring Biz Meetings To Florida</B>

By Lauren Bielski

<I>Florida</I>--once famed solely for the leisure appeal of endless golf, sunny beaches and palm trees--continues to successfully diversify its revenue base with a spate of high profile development announcements in Broward, Osceola, Orange and Orlando counties.

Add to this a statewide marketing campaign designed to pull in corporate meetings business among other sectors, and you have a state that is well en route to securing its goal of hosting 50 million visitors annually by 2000.

In Greater Fort Lauderdale--which effectively ditched spring break in favor of the meetings market about 15 years ago and has never looked back--developer R. Donahue Peebles last month said the company will build a 500-room convention center hotel and pave the way for more than $2 billion in infrastructure upgrades to the region. The announcement is a critical step in accelerating a six-year growth curve in corporate meetings.

"A place like Fort Lauderdale offers a compelling mix of leisure and business amenities," said Nicki Englander Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau. "We have the beaches, restaurants and shopping, and now we're getting serious convention capacity."

While Grossman tied her comments to Broward County, she might well have been discussing the cultural rebirth and market expansion of much of the state, which has lured corporations with the renaissance of the Art Deco district of Miami Beach and golf resorts like World Golf Village near Jacksonville (<I>Meetings Today</I>, Nov. 10, 1997).

In Orlando, too, new meeting options abound. Loews Hotels has begun building a 750-room luxury resort, set to open in spring 1999, called the Portofino Bay Hotel, modeled on the famed Italian resort village. Loews also intends to open a new-construction 650-room Hard Rock Hotel for hip rock-n-rollers onsite at Universal Florida in the fall of 2000.

These properties will help the working motion picture and television studio and theme park position itself against Disney while providing more options for corporate meeting planners.

Meanwhile, the Orange County Convention Center is currently undergoing an expansion that will give it 1.1 million square feet of exhibit space by the end of the year, with a 2,650-seat auditorium and 367,200 square-foot exhibit hall. To promote the region as a place where conventions and culture peacefully can co-exist, the county started a shuttle that takes visitors through Kissimmee, Lake Buena Vista, International Drive, downtown Orlando, Winter Park and Maitland cultural attractions.

With these sorts of programs and an unprecedented level of construction, the state is beginning to reinvent itself from a vacation haven to more of a convention spot, with the goal of flattening out the seasonal cycles that have dominated for so long, according to vice president of marketing Dee Ann Smith, of Visit Florida, the statewide tourism corporation.

Smith said the timing of Orlando, Kissimmee and Fort Lauderdale developments give Florida's statewide tourist agency even more to work with--but traffic to the state is already strong. Also raising the state's profile is a coordinated marketing effort that has tried to position it as a planner-friendly destination.

"Visit Florida," the new name for the state's private-public tourism partnership based in Tallahasee, doesn't have an official corporate meetings campaign, but it is helping the urban areas of the state market their assets to key corporate accounts. Meanwhile, the more rural areas of northern and southern Florida continue to attract incentive business.

Publicity representative Robin Knight said that Visit Florida has 751 partners, including hotels, attractions and theme park companies, convention bureaus, public relations and media corporations, and travel promotional businesses. The idea is to promote the distinguishing characteristics of each county/region and supplement leisure tourism with lucrative group business.

As part of this outreach, Visit Florida has launched separate planner-specific (www.imps.net/fla) and destination-general (www.flausa.com) Websites, as well as a meeting planner's guide. The campaign also includes the courting of corporate buyers through an annual day-long meeting and mini-tradeshow called "Florida Encounter."

"Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale continue to pull in a lot of meetings business. Fort Lauderdale has particularly benefited from its image makeover, as well as the announcements of the convention center expansion and adjacent hotel," Knight said. But the rest of Broward County also will see development--including no fewer than 19 hotels in a variety of market segments by the year 2000.

Knight said that other state regions with "the facilities and the look" to handle corporate business include Tampa, Kissimmee--a popular tourist destination that is currently in the midst of building a 2.4 million-square-foot high-tech meetings complex--and Jacksonville, which, like much of the state, offers a successful mix of impressive beaches, good hotels and historical landmarks and culture, including the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine.

The state is hoping that this mix of amenities, supported by increasing convention centers, will draw upscale corporate business. The Kissimmee venture, to be called the World Expo Center, will be close to downtown Orlando and the Orange County Convention Center, but will nevertheless, offer 120,000 square feet of meeting and function space and be supported by 5,000 hotel rooms.

The state's new image is starting to trickle down into once low-profile areas. In Jacksonville--perhaps the most established and yet least publicized corporate meetings city in the northeast--additions of 23,000 square feet of meeting space to the nearby Amelia Island Plantation as part of a $35 million expansion, provides more options for planners, as does the soon to open St. Johns County Convention Center near St. Augustine.

Kitty Ratcliff, immediate past president of Meeting Professionals International and current president of Jacksonville's Convention and Visitors Bureau, said that her group recently launched a new brochure that points out what a successful corporate hub Jacksonville is. "We are well-suited for corporate business," Ratcliff said. "I think it's just been a question of gaining a more singular identity that Jacksonville can be a place to work hard and enjoy great beaches later.