When does a visitor become a tourist? In Florida, it depends on who's doing the counting - and who the counter is working for.
By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published May 14, 2004
TAMPA - Tampa tourist marketers proudly announced Thursday that 2003 was a record-setting year for Hillsborough County, with 16.57-million visitors. That's more than three times as many people as Pinellas County counted.
Wait a minute. Isn't Pinellas County the one on the Gulf of Mexico, the one with 30-plus miles of beaches, the one with twice as many hotel rooms?
Yes.
Has Hillsborough's tourist industry suddenly grown bigger - three times bigger - than its nearby competition?
No.
The difference has everything to do with how a tourist is defined. In Pinellas County, a visitor has to spend the night to be counted as a tourist. But for the past decade, Hillsborough has counted anybody who crosses the county line to do anything but go to work. St. Petersburg residents shopping at International Plaza. Lakeland residents lunching at Buddy Freddy's in Plant City. Bradenton residents going to the state fair.
Wade into the flood of tourist numbers that Florida tourist marketers generate and one thing becomes immediately apparent: they are rife with comparisons between apples and oranges. Feeding the frenzy are 45 Florida counties that spend more than $130-million in hotel taxes to bankroll tourist promotion while commissioning reams of market research to figure out where to put the money.
"Getting uniform research standards statewide is one of our top priorities," said Robert Skrob, director of the Florida Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus. "Because so many counties tailor research for their own purposes, it's become a real big job to get a definitive big picture."
For the most part, the studies are scientific. But uniform results are elusive because the information is gathered for different reasons, typically to evaluate the success of the agency doing the gathering.
Visit Florida Inc., for instance, the state's tourist marketing agency, has the job of luring out-of-state residents to spend at least one night in Florida. So that's who the group counts - not Floridians on a weekend trip to the Keys. Orlando counts overnight visitors or anyone who drives at least an hour to get there.
That's consistent with a national standard sought by the Travel Industry Association, but it's still pretty arbitrary.
Hillsborough counts anybody who crosses the county line because the Tampa Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau wants a measure of Tampa's role as the regional hub of transportation and commerce. But one side effect is that Hillsborough's totals capture nearby visitors. For example, the second biggest in-state source of tourists, according to the 2003 study released Thursday, is Brooksville, less than an hour's drive north.
"It's not just Brooksville proper, but the area around it," explained Mark Bonn, president of Bonn Marketing Research Group, a Tallahassee firm that tracks Hillsborough tourism.
Later in its annual report, Hillsborough notes the county had 4.9-million overnight visitors in 2003. That's about the same number as Pinellas reported. But since the average length of stay in Hillsborough was 3.38 nights, or half that of Pinellas visitors, it needs more visitors to fill its 18,200 hotel rooms and condo rentals than Pinellas does to fill its 39,000.
While these studies all offer very exact figures, the head counts are not that precise.
Until a few years ago, the state actually hired people to count out-of-state license tags as visitors crossed the state line, and checked airport terminals to see how many people left. The state changed to more scientific surveys after many economists criticized the old count as bogus.
These days, Pinellas and Hillsborough each interview about 500 randomly chosen visitors each month at malls, beaches and Busch Gardens. That's how they arrive at estimates of how many stay in hotels, rental condos or with local friends and relatives. In Hillsborough, visitors answer 118 questions about who they are, where they are from and what they did during their stay.
The information is used to understand the customer and how to deploy advertising. Grand totals are used by state and local governments to make tax collection estimates. Economists latch on to them for a variety other studies.
Survey results are plugged into a computerized economic model of the local economy and visitor industry. Then a number cruncher pushes a button.
Tourism officials make no bones that bragging rights and the industry's penchant for boasting economic impact go with big-sounding numbers. Pinellas County considered changing its definition of a tourist a few years ago largely because of Hillsborough.
Instead, they now produce a day-tripper estimate once each year. So if somebody asks about Hillsborough's 16.57-million visitors, Pinellas marketers can reply that their county drew 12.6-million, if you add in 7.9-million people who crossed the county line for purposes other than work.
