Paul Phipps, chief marketing officer for Visit Florida, gave the keynote addressing at the most recent SB2 installment, The Tourist Agenda: Making the Most of a Travel Economy. We spoke with Phipps about ways the state tourism bureau will grow visitation to the Gulf Coast.

Are you working with airlines to get them to serve smaller airports like Sarasota? We do a lot with the low cost carriers—Allegiant, Jet Blue, Spirit, Frontier—just as we do with American, Delta, United and Southwest. We worked with Allegiant and they now have five origin cities going to Desdin-Fort Walton Beach Airport. We’ve got Air Canada going into Jacksonville now. To continue to grow, we need destination diversity. We need to tell the whole geographic story of Florida. That means we have to get our secondary airports outside of Miami and Orlando involved in that. There is an opportunity to get a European origin flight in Sarasota. That’s important for this area; it might be a twice a week, and if we do it right it could be four times a week.

You tell hoteliers it’s important to stay booked near capacity rather than growing infrastructure. Why?  What you want is controlled growth. For this area, you need to focus on taking the seasonality out. I would imagine that here, March is the highest occupancy month and September is the lowest. It probably has a 20-percent swing in occupancy. Focus on taking that 20 to 10. You haven’t done anything to infrastructure. You just say March is my bell cow, and make everything else look as much like March as I can. If I do that, I don’t need any more roads or any more hotels, but it takes the seasonality out of employment. Would that be a game changer? Absolutely. It changes the whole business model. When people say we have this shoulder season or it’s soft, I say ‘no, stop it.’ Every day is a great day to be in Florida.