Few Florida cities and counties that consider themselves tourist destinations are starting the New Year with a hand as rich as the one held by Fort Lauderdale and Broward County.
Aligned roughly across the Intracoastal Waterway from each other near Port Everglades, two major hotels stand to significantly lift the annual flow of leisure and business travelers into Greater Fort Lauderdale.
On the west bank: The nearly finished 800-room Omni Hotel, which is a linchpin of the publicly financed expansion of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center. The hotel is scheduled to open in September.
On the east bank: The re-imagined Pier Sixty-Six resort by Orlando developer Tavistock with the famous rotating “Pier Top.” The hotel operation, now with 325 rooms, formally opened its doors on Jan. 13.
“The one that will really affect the marketplace is the Omni. The goal is to bring more and larger conventions,” said Peter Ricci, director of the hotel and marketing program at Florida Atlantic University.
“In general, the addition of Omni itself will generate a good deal of numbers of visitors because of the simultaneous expansion and renovation of the convention center,” he said. “For example, instead of having 5,000 for a group, maybe now we can have 7,500. Think of the extra room nights, food, retail, car rental, and other ancillary spend of these extra visitors.”
The Pier Sixty-Six Resort “may be able to add additional luxury guests who were not previously coming to our destination” Ricci added. “They will have a rare type of showcase spa facility with such unique features that no other exists in the city or county.”
Generally, visitation should go up in the county, he asserted, “just by adding these additional rooms (combined).”
Pain and gain
Generally speaking, visitor levels in Broward held firm in 2024 as travelers weighed the impact of inflation on their family budgets and mulled a wide array of other choices to visit in the U.S. and abroad, analysts and tourism professionals said in recent interviews.
At an annual January forecast lunch sponsored by Visit Lauderdale, the county’s tourism promotion arm, President and CEO Stacy Ritter touted a cruise industry that funneled 4 million passengers through Port Everglades, which counts itself as a port of call mainly for luxury cruise lines these days. The volume was an increase of 39% over 2023. She also pointed to growth in “hotel demand,” which reflects a daily average of hotel rooms sold.
The hotel community generated $125.4 million in tourist development tax dollars, the agency said in a statement, and saw a 1.5% increase in “hotel demand,” which is a measure of average daily rooms sold.
The new year is expected to see the opening of five new hotels, including the 29-story Omni, adding more than 1,490 rooms and enhancing the destination’s appeal for conventions, events, and leisure travel. There will be more luxury, albeit higher prices, but the higher-income visitors are continuing to pay prices that have elevated since COVID-19, analysts and executives said.
“I’ve lived here for 50 years,” Ritter told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “If somebody told me 50 years ago there would be a Four Seasons or a Ritz Carlton, we would have all laughed. The kind of money that’s here .. especially among the young ones, it’s wonderful to see the multiple generations.”
Bargains are fewer in volume than they used to be, Ritter acknowledged. “You can find bargains, but because of our luxury options …. we are getting a higher-income visitor,” she said. Formerly, she added, “luxury travel was someplace else. Now they’re coming here.”
Many are coming from areas that were not previously sources of business for the area such as the Midwest cities of Cleveland and Cincinnati. “We get a lot from California, which was not a market for us five years ago,” she said.
But across Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, 2024 was a year of peaks and valleys for hotel occupancy rates and room revenue measures, particularly in the early part of the year, according to data from Costar, the research firm that tracks those figures.
Jan Freitag, the firm’s national director of hospitality analytics, predicted consumers will pay up to 3% more this year on average, with the upper income end of the market doing better than the lower end, where people have to make hard choices about spending on certain household items or taking a vacation.
Costar expects Fort Lauderdale area hoteliers to see “steady growth” in revenue per room, rising by as much as 4% this year.
By Costar’s count, the Greater Fort Lauderdale area is home to 39,000 rooms across 430 hotels.
Economy still strong to drive business
A critical driver of tourism — a strong economy — is likely to remain in place at least during the front end of the year, suggested Nick Miceli, regional president of Florida Metro, TD Bank.
“Last year’s small interest rate cuts have given businesses and consumers a bit more confidence and decreased inflation, but this may be short-lived if additional cuts don’t happen regularly throughout 2025,” he said by email. “Something of particular interest is that the state saw expansion in industries that typically bring higher wages, such as professional and business services, and Florida has made a full recovery in manufacturing jobs for the first time since 2005. This could help offset the impacts of slowing population growth.”
Miceli echoed Ritter’s enthusiasm for the cruise industry’s strength.
“Tourism in South Florida is especially affected by the cruise industry, and we’re seeing passenger counts have returned to pre-pandemic levels or even higher,” he said.
Marketing Broward, vintage properties
Ritter said she was pleased with the business driven by the Florida Panthers hockey club last year, which generated large volumes of Canadian visitors who traveled to Sunrise to watch their Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley Cup, which the hometown Panthers won.
She is less enthralled with the Inter Miami soccer club, which plays in a temporary stadium in Fort Lauderdale with the intent of moving to Miami and a new venue.
“The problem with Inter Miami is that people think it’s in Miami,” she said. Superstar Lionel Messi “not only plays here, he lives here and that’s really frustrating. I wish the team were named after where they play. So frankly, I don’t spend a lot of money” promoting them.
But she vowed to continue to promote Broward as a place where the LQBTQ community can feel comfortable visiting. “We’re not going to hide it; we are going to celebrate it,” she said.
Ritter also said she is confident that the discount air carrier Spirit Airlines, if it fails to successfully reorganize in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, will be replaced by other airlines to “fill the gap.” The carrier, before its filing, was the leading airline in passengers flown at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
At the forecast lunch, Ritter unveiled a new suite of initiatives designed to attract customers from other parts of the country.
♦ “Breaking Free” Winter Campaign: Aimed at targeted cold urban areas of the north such as Chicago, prospective visitors who have had enough of the bone-chilling temperatures will see public messaging designed to woo them to South Florida.
♦ IndyCar Partnership: In a first, the agency is sponsoring an IndyCar team. During the racing season, logos will appear on race cars, driver suits, and truck trailers that transport the cars. During live race coverage through in-car cameras, motorsport fans will be exposed to the agency’s “Everyone Under the Sun” message of inclusion that Greater Fort Lauderdale welcomes everyone to visit the area.
♦ 31 Flavors of Greater Fort Lauderdale: In league with Baskin-Robbins, the agency is creating a custom menu of 31 ice cream flavors that bear the names of the county’s towns and cities. They’ll debut as “pop-ups” in targeted markets.
The initiatives, Ritter said, are designed to keep Greater Fort Lauderdale top-of-mind among people who live in regions that have been traditional sources of business such as the Northeast. “We spend a lot of money in the Northeast,” she said. “The people know us (and) love us.”
Outreach is also occurring in Europe and South and Central America, as well as Canada, the Bahamas and Mexico. The latter three are the county’s top three international sources of tourism. She’s also counting on the United Kingdom and Germany — “It’s still snowing there,” she said — and starting to make contacts for the first time in Spain and Portugal.
Ritter said that although Pier Sixty-Six is high on a list of highlights for her teams to discuss while on the road, she can’t mount a dedicated campaign for it because Visit Lauderdale is a publicly funded agency.
Colm O’Callaghan, vice president and managing director for the resort, acknowledged his sales and marketing group has its own work to do to make the newly minted $1 billion project stand out in the U.S. and international markets.
“We’re obviously positioning Pier Sixty-Six as a destination in and of itself with an array of amenities unlike anything up and down the coast,” he said, ticking off a list that includes a dozen restaurants, spa, adult and children’s pool complexes, ballroom space for weddings and business meetings, not to mention the marina that can become home to superyachts up to 400 feet in length.
“The Pier Top in all of its former glory — it will rotate again in a full circle every 66 minutes,” he said.
“Pier Sixty-Six is going to appeal to somebody that is looking for both a relaxing and exciting breakaway,” O’Callaghan added. “You could stay here for a week and eat someplace different probably every night.”
The competitive edge
One day after the Visit Lauderdale meeting, members of Fort Lauderdale’s Downtown Development Authority heard a tourism presentation from Visit Lauderdale. While members liked the progress, some talked of the need for better walkability on the 17th Street Causeway, site of the convention center, and the need for more retail, which pales in comparison to Greater Miami and Palm Beach County.
Despite existing internal challenges and the proximity of rival destinations such as Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, business leaders like Fort Lauderdale’s chances for market share growth over the long term.
“There’s always room for improvement,” said longtime developer Charlie Ladd, the immediate past DDA chair who is building a 12-story boutique hotel on Las Olas Boulevard. “When Fort Lauderdale compares itself to other cities — would you rather drive from the Fort Lauderdale airport to the convention center and downtown? Or would you rather drive to Miami? It’s a pretty easy call.”