Pinellas County tourist promoters think the coast is clear enough to begin advertising that hurricane season is almost over and the beaches are back to normal.
A few Clearwater Beach hotels are not fully open and some Pinellas beaches suffered severe erosion, but marketers say enough of the county's tourist infrastructure survived intact that it's time to begin changing perceptions in travelers' minds.
So the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, which canceled all tourist advertising it could once Hurricane Charley ripped through Florida in August, unveiled a $340,000 campaign on Wednesday that hits newspapers and other print media across the Midwest and Northeast beginning Oct. 24.
The ads, which leave open space to print cut-rate travel deals with co-op partners, feature a hurricane glass on the beach and a suggestion that a windblown paper umbrella is the only lasting hurricane effect.
There is urgency to the message. The Yankelovich National Travel Monitor recently found 34 percent of domestic travelers think the St. Petersburg/Clearwater area was "extremely" damaged by hurricanes. While the normally slow fall tourist season is almost fully restored among Tampa Bay hotels, revenue per available room in October is running a few percentage points below the same period in 2003.
Other Florida destinations, some of them rivals, are heading back to the airwaves. Miami is unleashing a $300,000 fall campaign and Visit Florida Inc. is draining its $2-million reserves on hurricane recovery advertising that airs before Christmas and a stepped up PR campaign.
Visit Florida is lobbying the Legislature for up to $30-million in extra tourist ad money, but is doing research to see how badly the state's image has been hurt to make the case. Gov. Jeb Bush has been most concerned about how the state will fare during the next hurricane season, especially among group business that fills hotels mostly from August into the fall.
Visit Florida's latest research effort will gauge how vacationers feel about Florida in November, then ask again in May to see how much hurricane disaster perceptions linger.
Pinellas researchers have done their own survey work. They found that fewer than half of travelers thought Pinellas was damaged by the hurricanes. But 28 percent of them considered the damage minor, while 9 percent thought it was serious.
"We are moving in the right direction," said Walter Klages, president of Research Data Services Inc. "We are being seen less and less as affected."
Other parts of the state were ravaged, but travelers' perceptions were no doubt affected by news reports that had Tampa Bay in the cross hairs of three hurricanes. Then the worst of the storms' fury shifted to places such as Punta Gorda, Pensacola and Daytona Beach.
Nonetheless, Pinellas tourism was down in August. The number of hotel visitors dropped 4 percent to 220,000 and the number of room nights sold slid by 5.2 percent. Many hotels filled up with storm refugees. Hillsborough County hotels were up sharply in August. But in Pinellas refugees were outnumbered by visitors who moved inland. It was worse for hotels that rely on business meetings, as many meetings canceled because of the bad weather.
"Our October is looking good," said Russ Bond, general manager of the Renaissance Vinoy Resort, which had to be evacuated. "But the business we lost was devastating. It was more than $1-million."
The storms ended what had been a strong revival of the vacation market from the United Kingdom. "Travel agencies and tour operators are reporting there is no last-minute business to Florida for the next few months and reservations for 2005 have dropped off markedly," said Geoff Rowcliffe, who runs the St. Petersburg/Clearwater sales office in London.
