3 minute read
Market voices: Tampa Bay hotels
Kevin Kennedy
General Manager Streamsong Resort
COVID was unexpected globally. Unfortunately, it’s a very sad situation. However, if you’re looking for any silver linings that came out of it, I would, in fact, point to our ability to close two of our courses. We were able to take advantage of the time it was closed in 2020 to take two of our great golf courses and revamp them. We had already been researching and testing many different types of grass to determine the ultimate putting surface for our customers. With all that testing and then COVID’s arrival, the opportunity came to regrass the greens with Mach-1 Bermuda grass. That was a tremendous opportunity for the resort. The grass was able to grow in very well, and it still has another year of solid growth. Next year, we will have one of the best putting surfaces in the United States.
When we are selling a meeting or travel offering, we lead with our Safe Meetings Program. We branded it in a similar way that any and every major hotel chain is doing as each has its own tailored safe travel program, including Marriott and Hilton. For our company, the Safe Meeting Program is a package we put together to raise awareness about how we set up our meeting space with socially distanced meeting room sets. We took pictures and designed animations to show how meetings in our hotel previously looked, with a standard meeting room setup, and contrasting that with a space that continuously reminds guests of our safety provisions, including compulsory masks, setting for social distancing at all times, sanitizer stations, hand sprayers and electrostatic cleaning, along with other visual representations of a safe, clean environment.
David Rowland
General Manager The Westshore Grand Hotel
Tabish Siddiquie
General Manager The Vinoy Renaissance St. Petersburg Resort & Golf Club
One of the advantages of being in Florida is that leisure travelers and those in our drive markets are probably still traveling more than other types of travelers. As stay-at-home restrictions lifted this summer, the travel industry has seen an uptick in leisure travel within drive markets. The nearby airlift and the fact that The Vinoy is in a big drive market from Orlando, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and other major cities has helped us quite a bit.
We are seeing predominantly leisure travelers, small meetings and social events that are still booking. Large groups are not booking right now because extensive business travel has been temporarily reduced, as travelers who used to do face-to-face meetings are now hosting them digitally. The Vinoy’s marketing efforts have always had a focus on digital and social, and we’re placing an emphasis on that now more than ever.
( ) a return of conference traffic with enhanced health protocols and mask rules through financial incentives based on attendance figures. And the region is even taking market share away from the likes of New York and Chicago, including national trade show Connect Marketplace, which is usually held in Washington D.C. Comic Con, WrestleMania and MetroCon will also return to Tampa Bay.
‘Champa Bay’ Although not quite the event that the region had envisioned initially, Super Bowl LV was allowed to go ahead at the Raymond James Stadium. While there were some doubts over safety and the ability to socially distance due to the capacity of 22,000, the event did not seem to cause an apparent spike in COVID-19 numbers. According to health experts, Hillsborough County saw a slight uptick in its positivity rate but no large superspreader event was detected at the Super Bowl celebrations, with only 57 cases linked to the event. The event itself was a roaring success, bringing hotel occupancy to 92.1% for the weekend, outperforming the 2009 Super Bowl Weekend. Hotel revenue totaled $14.29 million and although the economic impact on the region is thought to have been less than the usual $300500 million brought in by Super Bowl celebrations, airport traffic and media exposure gave a boost to the tourism industry. Initiatives such as The Business Connect program were set up to promote diverse-owned businesses across the area and the host committee and NFL donated $2 million to invest in the needs of the Tampa Bay community. To top it all off, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won.
