What's next for Destination 2020
- May 8, 2015
- / Carlton Proctor
- / economy
Visit Pensacola Inc.'s stagy rollout of its new Destination 2020 marketing strategy effectively ends one era of local tourism promotion efforts, and the begins another.
The event, held Thursday at the newly restored Rex Theater, attracted more than 400 people, including prominent elected officials, business and civic leaders, and key stakeholders in the tourism industry. The report is available here.
The robust turnout was a clear indication of just how important tourism is to Escambia County's overall economy.
The numbers cited during the event are impressive:
— 20,000 jobs directly related to the tourism industry.
— $1.3 billion overall economic impact.
— 1.3 million visitors to the area during the past year.
— $700 million in direct spending in area hotels.
— More than $60 million generated in sales tax by outside visitors.
The impressive attendance also showed just how much underlying support there is for revving up the tourism industry to a higher level — much higher.
While the broad community support and enthusiasm for the Destination 2020 event was refreshing, it was in stark — and welcomed — contrast to the poor condition tourism was in a just few years ago.
To better understand how and why Destination 2020 came into being, it's worth taking a look back to 2010 when the first fault lines began showing in the community's tourism industry.
Five years ago tourism promotion was a division of the Pensacola Bay Area Chamber of Commerce, now called the Greater Pensacola Chamber.
Marketing and promotion were coordinated by the chamber's Visit Pensacola. Its executive director was Ed Schroeder, a chamber employee.
At that time the tourism industry was on its heels.
The Great Recession was crippling economic growth, and tourists with disposable income were staying close to home.
To add insult to injury, the BP oil spill in April 2010 all but wiped out an entire tourism season along the central Gulf Coast.
Losses by hotels, restaurants, shops and entertainment venues were in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
While this economic beat down was happening, the mood among leading hoteliers was growing darker by the day.
A small group, led by hoteliers Julian MacQueen, Nash and Jay Patel, and Bob and Dave Cleveland, began a behind-the-scenes effort to completely restructure the way tourism marketing and promotion was handled.
In short, the hoteliers wanted control of the Tourist Development Tax revenues, also known as bed tax dollars.
Their hotels were generating the bulk of the revenues, and, they argued, they could do a better job of deciding how to spend it to attract tourists.
That argument started to win over local politicians with both the city and county.
What's more, it became apparent the distribution of those bed tax dollars was uneven.
Perdido Key and Pensacola Beach business leaders complained about the fractured nature of local marketing efforts, and also that they were not being given their fair share of bed tax revenues for their own promotional efforts.
In September 2012 the first of several small quakes began to rock the chamber leadership.
Then chamber CEO Jim Hizer learned Schroeder had been collaborating, without his knowledge, with the hoteliers' efforts to wrest control of bed tax dollars from the chamber.
Schroeder was subsequently fired, but the chamber's board of directors began to see the writing on the wall: Escambia County commissioners, lead mostly by Grover Robinson, were siding with hoteliers and wanted a complete overhaul of tourism promotion in Escambia County.
That came in January 2014 when the chamber, under the interim leadership of former Pensacola mayor Jerry Maygarden, spun off the chamber's control of tourism promotion to Visit Pensacola Inc., a separate, public entity whose board is composed of hoteliers and other stakeholders in the tourism industry.
Visit Pensacola Inc. also had new executive leadership in Steve Hayes, a veteran tourism marketer from the Tampa area.
Not long after Hayes took over Visit Pensacola, he began laying the groundwork for the new Destination 2020 strategy.
Over the past six months, Hayes, along with consultant Mona Amodeo and her idgroup staff, hosted a series of public workshops to listen, learn and compile suggestions from the public about how to best take tourism to the next level and beyond.
The report presented Thursday at the Rex Theater highlighted the community's strengths and weaknesses, and challenges it will have to address if tourism is to remain a major pillar of the economy.
Hayes told the Rex audience that more community meetings will take place this summer, and implementation of the plan will get under way this fall.
That's when the Destination 2020 rubber hits the road.
How will Visit Pensacola effectively leverage the more than $8 million in bed tax dollars to market and promote Escambia County tourism?
Will all the work that's gone into Destination 2020 give this community a viable game plan for growing tourism?
Time will tell.
But clearly getting the answers to those questions right is critical to this community’s future.
The impressive attendance also showed just how much underlying support there is for revving up the tourism industry to a higher level — much higher.
While the broad community support and enthusiasm for the Destination 2020 event was refreshing, it was in stark — and welcomed — contrast to the poor condition tourism was in a just few years ago.
To better understand how and why Destination 2020 came into being, it's worth taking a look back to 2010 when the first fault lines began showing in the community's tourism industry.
Five years ago tourism promotion was a division of the Pensacola Bay Area Chamber of Commerce, now called the Greater Pensacola Chamber.
Marketing and promotion were coordinated by the chamber's Visit Pensacola. Its executive director was Ed Schroeder, a chamber employee.
At that time the tourism industry was on its heels.
The Great Recession was crippling economic growth, and tourists with disposable income were staying close to home.
To add insult to injury, the BP oil spill in April 2010 all but wiped out an entire tourism season along the central Gulf Coast.
Losses by hotels, restaurants, shops and entertainment venues were in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
While this economic beat down was happening, the mood among leading hoteliers was growing darker by the day.
A small group, led by hoteliers Julian MacQueen, Nash and Jay Patel, and Bob and Dave Cleveland, began a behind-the-scenes effort to completely restructure the way tourism marketing and promotion was handled.
In short, the hoteliers wanted control of the Tourist Development Tax revenues, also known as bed tax dollars.
Their hotels were generating the bulk of the revenues, and, they argued, they could do a better job of deciding how to spend it to attract tourists.
That argument started to win over local politicians with both the city and county.
What's more, it became apparent the distribution of those bed tax dollars was uneven.
Perdido Key and Pensacola Beach business leaders complained about the fractured nature of local marketing efforts, and also that they were not being given their fair share of bed tax revenues for their own promotional efforts.
In September 2012 the first of several small quakes began to rock the chamber leadership.
Then chamber CEO Jim Hizer learned Schroeder had been collaborating, without his knowledge, with the hoteliers' efforts to wrest control of bed tax dollars from the chamber.
Schroeder was subsequently fired, but the chamber's board of directors began to see the writing on the wall: Escambia County commissioners, lead mostly by Grover Robinson, were siding with hoteliers and wanted a complete overhaul of tourism promotion in Escambia County.
That came in January 2014 when the chamber, under the interim leadership of former Pensacola mayor Jerry Maygarden, spun off the chamber's control of tourism promotion to Visit Pensacola Inc., a separate, public entity whose board is composed of hoteliers and other stakeholders in the tourism industry.
Visit Pensacola Inc. also had new executive leadership in Steve Hayes, a veteran tourism marketer from the Tampa area.
Not long after Hayes took over Visit Pensacola, he began laying the groundwork for the new Destination 2020 strategy.
Over the past six months, Hayes, along with consultant Mona Amodeo and her idgroup staff, hosted a series of public workshops to listen, learn and compile suggestions from the public about how to best take tourism to the next level and beyond.
The report presented Thursday at the Rex Theater highlighted the community's strengths and weaknesses, and challenges it will have to address if tourism is to remain a major pillar of the economy.
Hayes told the Rex audience that more community meetings will take place this summer, and implementation of the plan will get under way this fall.
That's when the Destination 2020 rubber hits the road.
How will Visit Pensacola effectively leverage the more than $8 million in bed tax dollars to market and promote Escambia County tourism?
Will all the work that's gone into Destination 2020 give this community a viable game plan for growing tourism?
Time will tell.
But clearly getting the answers to those questions right is critical to this community’s future.
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