Where are those Yankees? Not at Alabama’s sugar-white sand beaches.
Of the top 18 states who send tourists to coastal Alabama each summer, none are in New England. Only Pennsylvania is listed among the states that had a measurable number of visitors coming to Alabama, according to a 2014 Gulf Shores Orange Beach Tourism report.
“When I talk to them about Alabama they look at me funny, ‘Alabama? What’s in Alabama?'” said Kathy Hadley, an upstate New York resident who, along with her husband Pat, spend six months each year in Gulf Shores. “That’s the response I get from my New York friends who have been traveling down to Florida for years.”
And into Florida, those New Yorkers go.
According to 2013 statistics from the Emerald Coast’s Convention and Visitors Bureau – which represents Florida Panhandle coastal cities like Destin, Fort Walton Beach and Okaloosa Island – New York is the No. 2 top domestic origin state for visitors to Florida. Only Georgia, just a short drive away, sends more folks to Florida.
Florida’s New York appeal isn’t affecting Alabama’s numbers. The state’s Gulf Coast recorded its fifth year in a row of record tourism since the 2010 BP oil spill disaster threatened to silence Alabama’s biggest tourism draw – the beach.
“To get to Florida, you have to drive a long way,” Alabama Department of Tourism and Travel Director Lee Sentell said. “So people who are going to vacations in Florida, it’s more of a considered purchase. When people go to Florida they stay longer. And (Florida travelers) … it’s Interstate 95 traffic. That’s a much more north-south drive market whereas Gulf Shores and Orange Beach are centrally located for the Deep South.”
With record tourism figures each of the last five years, Alabama’s Gulf Coast is capturing more Midwest visitors thanks largely to Interstate 65 – which runs south of Chicago, slicing through Indianapolis and Nashville before heading into Alabama.
“We are predominately a drive market,” said Herb Malone, president CEO of the Gulf Shores Orange Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We have I-65 from the north and south and I-10 from the east-west. If you take a look at our core market – Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Louisiana. There is Arkansas, Missouri and on up to Minnesota east to Ohio and that pretty much defines our market.”
Statistics show the trend. The CVB’s profile of winter visitors – composed mostly of retirees affectionately referred to as “snow birds” for their three-month visits from January to March each year – shows that behind Alabama and Mississippi, off-season visitors to Alabama’s Gulf Coast are mostly coming from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
Only three eastern states – North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Maryland – are represented among the top 18 states visiting coastal Alabama during the winter months.
Summer visitors largely flood in from the South, CVB data shows. Out-of-state visitors flocking to Alabama’s beaches during its busiest season are coming from Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, Georgia and Arkansas.
The farthest state to the east, North Carolina, is statistically listed among the states with visitors coming during peak summer season.
“We have some people who come in from upstate New York (during the winter season), but in the spring and summer season, most of our Northeast markets … they gravitate straight down the East Coast to the Carolinas or to the East Coast beaches,” Malone said.
Said Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft, “It’s really an uphill battle to get them here. It’s so much easier to get (Northeast visitors) to the East Coast … North Carolina and South Carolina and into the east coast of Florida. It’s so much easier for them to get there than here.”
Marketing Alabama’s beaches, as a result, is focused more on states to the west – Texas and Louisiana, in particular – and along the I-65 corridor.
“Dauphin Island and then Gulf Shores are the western-most white sand beaches in the country,” Sentell said. “People in Houston think of Gulf Shores as their beach. People in Missouri and Oklahoma think of Gulf Shores as their sand. Because Gulf Shores and Orange Beach are within a day’s drive of so much of the Deep South, someone can make a decision on Wednesday, book a condo at Alabama’s beaches and be there on Friday night. You are not going to do that in the eastern coast of Florida because it’s a long drive.”
Meanwhile, the entire state of Florida relies heavily on New York visitors. New York City trails only Atlanta among the top origin designated markets for Florida visitors.
New Yorkers are also making their way to Destin, Okaloosa Island and Fort Walton Beach. According to Emerald Coast CVB statistics, New York ranks 10th among visitors to a region that is about a two-hour drive east from Mobile.
“The Northeast is an obstacle that is lower on our list of audiences we want to attract, but it’s not completely forgotten,” Craft said.
Sentell said the biggest hurdle is marketing costs. Whereas state tourism is allowed free airtime on Montgomery-based Raycom Media stations that extend into the Midwest, there is no such arrangement with a TV station east of Richmond, Va.
“The Northeast is such an expensive media market,” Sentell said.
Ironically, it was a BP advertisement four years ago encouraging Americans to visit the Gulf Coast’s beaches that drew the Hadley’s to Alabama’s Gulf Coast.
“Pat didn’t want to go to Florida, too far south and too commercial,” Kathy Hadley said. “Then we started looking at Atlantic Coast and looking at statistics. The Atlantic ocean is cold. That, again, is priced too expensive. We kept looking and I said, ‘What about Alabama?’ We keep hearing these (BP) commercials.”
In 2012, the Hadley’s moved South to vacation in Gulf Shores. They met and friended neighbors and fell in love with the scenery and relative quietness of the area.
But the Hadley’s are an anomaly. Every year, when the snow birds flock to coastal Alabama for summer, they will gather up into groups separated by the states in which they live. Wisconsin, Missouri, and Illinois’ snow bird clubs are all well-represented during weekly or bi-weekly meetings, coffee hours and events.
New York? “There are only 80 of us,” Hadley said, noting that the small club will get together for trivial pursuit games, golf outings and low country boils.
“What Alabama has to do is promote not just the beach, but the history and the remoteness and quietness of it and the people who want to get back to nature and the fact that there is great fishing in Alabama (other than the Gulf),” she said.
“(New Yorkers) don’t know that Alabama has 60 miles of gorgeous beachfront,” she added. “Everyone thinks of it as Birmingham and Montgomery. It’s like when I talk to people (from Alabama about) New York and all they think about is New York City. There is a whole other state out there.”
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