Breaking tourism records is great, but without breaking ground on more hotels in the Sarasota-Bradenton area, some tourism officials believe the visitation boom could be stymied.
Source: www.heraldtribune.com
Visitors to Sarasota County jumped 10.9 percent when compared with the previous year in the second quarter of 2015, and record-breaking tourism numbers have become habit. But the area has to be able to provide the hotel beds needed to keep the numbers growing, said Virginia Haley, president of Visit Sarasota County, the county’s tourism agency.
The 6,200 hotel and motel rooms in Manatee County and 5,027 in Sarasota County have an average occupancy rate of 95 percent during the tourism season.
There are a large number of new hotel projects on the books that could bring as many as 1,000 new rooms to the area over the next 36 months.