New hotel inventory like downtown’s Aloft have helped Hillsborough significantly increase bet tax collections and room revenues. Here, Aloft developer Punit Shah and his wife, Carla, pose in front of the WXYZ Bar.
Chris Wilkerson
Deputy Editor- Tampa Bay Business Journal
It has been a good year for the hotel industry in Hillsborough County so far in 2015, with sharply higher revenues per available room putting Tampa at No. 1 among comparable metro areas.
“Every month we’re showing double digit growth over last year,” Santiago Corrada, president and CEO of Visit Tampa Bay, said in a statement. “It’s nice to be No. 1 against our competitive set and it’s overwhelming the amount of business we’re driving here.”
Room occupancy in February was at about 86 percent, 7 percent from the same month in 2014. The room rate was up 10 percent from 2014 at $119.48 and the revenue per available room was up 18 percent at $108.
The Tampa metro’s room revenue numbers are usually in the top three of its competitive set. The other cities in the set include Ft. Lauderdale; Orlando; Charlotte, N.C.; Nashville, Tenn.; Baltimore, Md.; Milwaukee; Austin, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Fort Worth, Texas; and Long Beach, Calif., according to Visit Tampa Bay.
Hillsborough County collected about $2.5 million in Tourism Development Taxes in February. That number is up more than 16 percent from last year. This year’s fiscal calendar for Visit Tampa Bay – which began Oct. 1 – is running more than 15 percent over last year at this point and almost 9 percent over 2007’s numbers, the previous record.
Corrada has set a goal of reaching a three-year total of $30 million in bed taxes by Dec. 31, 2017. This achievement would bump Hillsborough County onto Florida’s list of “high-impact tourism” counties. Then, the county commission could potentially raise the bed tax by a penny. Eight Florida counties now qualify — Duval, Volusia, Orange, Osceola, Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Pinellas.
Chris Wilkerson is Deputy Editor of the Tampa Bay Business Journal.
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