Can Miami keep tourism momentum in 2023?
Destination marketing leader gives prognosis
Miami’s tourism industry recorded a breakout year in 2022, as the country recovered from the coronavirus pandemic. Miami International Airport saw its highest-ever passenger traffic, big events and conferences returned and hotel room rates soared yet sold out.
With stubborn inflation lingering and a possible recession looming large in the nation’s economic outlook for 2023, maintaining visitor momentum from the last two years for another year will be a tough challenge for Miami.
This was the first full year that David Whitaker led the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, Miami-Dade County’s publicly funded, nonprofit destination marketing agency. Whitaker was vice president from 1990 to 2007, before leaving for Toronto’s tourism marketing agency. After that and a stint as CEO of Choose Chicago he came back to Miami in August 2021.
The Miami Herald sat down with Whitaker to discuss the boom year that’ll close in a week and what he sees ahead for Miami-Dade’s tourism sector in 2023. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Give us a summary of Miami-Dade tourism this year and your 2023 outlook.
We’ve been looking at the past year to see some trends. We track our hotel occupancy levels to help us understand how we’re competing with others. January through October, our occupancy was up 10% over the previous year, a total of 72.2% occupancy in 2022. And that was the sixth-highest occupancy in the country in major markets. We were only beat by Oahu, San Diego, New York, Orlando and Tampa.
It’s not just about occupancy, though, it’s about what you charge for a room. Our average daily rate, January through October, was $251, which is 18.8% higher than 2021. That’s really encouraging because we haven’t had to discount to attract visitors. In that ranking, we have the third-highest hotel rates in the country, after Oahu and New York. More importantly, that’s 38% higher than before the pandemic in 2019, our best year ever.
So the question then becomes, how are you going to maintain that success? How are we going to be able to continue to command high numbers of visitors and charge high rates? If we’re going to get a much higher paying customer, we have to give them an even more fulfilling experience. Obviously, we feel bullish about that. We’re offering incredible hotels and our new hotels are mostly luxury, upper-end properties. We’ve seen exciting, sophisticated, high-end restaurants explode all over Miami-Dade. This destination has to have an experience. It can’t just be be
cause it’s warm, even though the weather is fantastic. There’s a lot of warm weather destinations out there. We have the combination of weather, great food, great culture and great events.
We’re still looking in 2023 to recapture Miami’s international visitors because we’re still down
10% overall in that category from 2019. We’ve got seven new international flights coming to Miami International Airport, from big markets for us, like Colombia, France and Canada. International travel to the rest of the United States is down, so we’re doing well compared to the rest of the country.
High hotel rates caused SeaTrade, the cruise industry’s largest conference, to move north to Broward County for 2023. Is there concern about losing business travel to Miami because it’s getting too expensive?
I don’t think we have any other lost business to report. Our convention and business travel outlook is looking good for this year. But we have to look out for that, the high average daily hotel rates is a good news and bad news scenario. We have to be fine tuned in who we are soliciting, targeting the right corporate groups that have the ability to pay for a business trip to a sophisticated destination. We also have the new host hotel planned to be constructed at the convention center, which will be a game-changer for our conventions. The goal is that convention hotel will be up and running by November of 2025, and we will start selling that hotel the day construction starts.
Have you seen business travel bounce back to pre-pandemic levels?
The conventions are pretty steady. We had a record year in terms of leads for conventions and business travel, so that’s a good barometer for the future. All these startup businesses and investment firms and fintech companies that are relocating here or expanding here bodes well for everyone. That’s not necessarily in the purview of the convention and visitors’ bureau, but we’re thrilled to hear about firms like Citadel coming to Miami. People travel here to do business with big companies like that, so there’s a correlation there with business travel.
Many economists are predicting a recession sometime in the new year and continued high inflation. What’s your contingency plan if the U.S. economy takes a sharp downturn?
We’ve been talking about inflation now for 18 months and it has not slowed down the engine, which is Miami Beach hotel success. But anytime there’s challenges and headwinds in the economy, it’s obviously a concern. That just means we have to be even more fine tuned and tell a story to inspire a visitor that has the means and ends to be here. Things like Formula 1, Art Basel and yearround offerings like the art, fashion, architecture and culinary scene. Look at the success of the Michelin Guide, for example. There are 17 Michelinstarred restaurants in Miami now. Those are the kinds of things that we just need to continue to fuel.
You promote tourism throughout MiamiDade County. What are some areas you plan to market outside of Miami Beach?
Look at the resurgence of some of our neighborhoods. Wynwood, for instance, is an incredible success story. We just saw the first hotel open in Wynwood. Coconut Grove just saw the Mayfair Hotel reopen and has had lots of new, exciting restaurants. There’s the new Loews Hotel in Coral Gables. Allapattah is an upcoming destination. Doral is quietly building its destination and is one of the best sellers for hotels in the region because of corporate business out there. There’s an explosion of wedding markets in Homestead with the farmhouse wedding venues. Bal Harbour and Sunny Isles have had new hotel openings this year. We have one of the best resorts in the country in Sunny Isles, the Acquilina. The brand that is known around the world is South Beach, but the beach brand is for the whole destination. The smaller pockets and neighborhoods provide those unique experiences.
What’s the biggest challenge for tourism businesses in MiamiDade in 2023?
Maintaining momentum. To accomplish that, we need to maintain the experience. Customer service has to be a major priority, getting our men and women back to work and in position to serve our visitors in a tight labor market. Visa wait times are also still a big issue for getting those international visitors back here, especially from Brazil, our second-biggest international market. We are at record-setting visitor levels overall, so there’s no going back.
Anna Jean Kaiser: 305-376-2239, @annajkaiser