Charley's refugees, Frances' evacuees fill Florida hotels
Reservations canceled by skittish tourist are quickly snapped up by people fleeing the hurricane.
By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published September 3, 2004
People trying to escape the fury of Hurricane Frances are finding there's very little room at the inn in Florida.
"Just about every hotel room from here to Macon, Ga., is booked," said Greg Laskoski, spokesman for AAA South in Tampa.
Many still housing refugees from Hurricane Charley, most Tampa Bay area hotels were sold out by early Thursday. Beach hotels in Pinellas County, jammed with leisure visitors celebrating the Labor Day weekend, juggled last-minute cancellations from out-of-state vacationers with business pouring in from tourists and residents evacuated from the Atlantic Coast.
"Availability changes hour to hour," said Rosemarie Payne, sales director of the Sirata Beach Resort in St. Pete Beach. "Every cancellation is filled within minutes."
At 11 a.m. Thursday, only 179 rooms were reported available among an inventory of roughly 18,000 in Hillsborough County.
"It got so crazy I was running the switchboard myself," said Katie Doherty, general manager of the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center in Pinellas Park. "We sold out for the whole weekend in three hours Wednesday."
Among those checking in: Red Cross workers still working on Hurricane Charley relief, utility crews waiting to be dispatched to Hurricane Frances cleanup duty and workers from two South Florida high-tech companies seeking a safe place to work next week.
Visit Florida Inc. and visitors bureaus in more than two dozen Florida counties are posting and constantly updating room availability at thousands of Florida hotels. The lists and hotel phone numbers can be accessed through flausa.com or visitflorida.com. Visit Florida also hired a 50-person call center in Sarasota to staff a statewide hurricane hotel hotline. The number is 800-287-8598.
"Operators have access to all available lodging by city, but because of liability they cannot recommend where to go to avoid the hurricane," said Tom Flanigan, spokesman for the state tourist marketing agency.
The flow of hotel traffic is the exact opposite of Hurricane Charley. Thousands of Tampa Bay residents fled to Orlando area hotels to steer clear of Charley. Then the storm shifted to a path east of Tampa. That placed many refugees in Orlando, Kissimmee and Daytona Beach right in the maelstrom.
For Frances, people began calling to book hotels here five days before the storm's forecast landfall in the United States. European tour operators moved some British vacationers from South Florida beach towns that were evacuated to hotels on the Gulf Coast, such as St. Pete Beach.
But most European package tour vacationers in Orlando will weather the storm there because it is considered safer as an inland city, and because there are too few hotel rooms available to move them elsewhere. Besides, said one Central Florida tour operator, Frances covers a swath almost as wide as the state. So it will be hard to get out of the storm's path.
Nonetheless, all types of people were looking for a place to stay. Tampa tourist marketers were searching Thursday for a place to put up an MTV film crew in town for Ozzfest. The Wyndham Westshore Hotel in Tampa was awaiting a group of 14 Bahamians trying to stay ahead of the storm.
The Linger Longer Mobile Home Park in Tarpon Springs rented eight parking spaces to South Florida RV owners and was hoping to get more.
Business was brisk even in remote Perry, where rooms in a vintage 1950s 35-room motel fetched $40 a night.
"We've got a few rooms left, but they are filling up fast," said Shaqaku Patel, manager of the Old Gandy Motor Court on U.S. 19.
