Winter? What winter? In the two-season cities of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, it’s either sultry or spring-like, while some things never go out of season—or style. Shorts and sandals, for example, are the year-round
uniform, so don’t be shy about baring those winter-white gams and letting the sun do its job while you’re enjoying the golf courses, tennis courts, beaches, or parks.
Flip the calendar to any month and you’re likely to find a festival going on, whether it’s a parade of yachts sailing up Fort Lauderdale’s Intracoastal Waterway, a parade of salsa dancers filling the streets of Little Havana, or paintings on parade during the annual Coconut Grove Arts Festival.
Professional sports are also on a year-round calendar in South Florida, putting Miami and Fort Lauderdale in a league of their own when it comes to baseball, basketball, football, hockey, or jai-alai, plus a string of minor-league teams, major golf and tennis tournaments, thoroughbred racing, and NASCAR meets.
You might need some fuel to get all of this in, so pull up a chair at the culinary banquet that is Miami and Fort Lauderdale’s dining scene, which combines picture-perfect tropical settings with tastes that transcend the tropics to include cuisine from around the world. Of course, you can find incredible international cuisine in other major U.S. cities, but not many offer dining alfresco in the middle of January.
While home-grown fruits, vegetables and seafood often end up on a restaurant plate in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, home-grown talent announces itself in dance, theater, music, and art productions throughout the region, putting many visitors who came here just for the beach in an artistic frame of mind. It’s just one of many surprises along the way in the southernmost corner of the Sunshine State.
Miami
Another surprise for anyone who hasn’t been to Miami for a while: the number of new hotels at every turn, especially in places like the downtown corridor—previously a concrete canyon of office buildings but now home to names like Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, JW Marriott, and Conrad—and the northern Miami Beach neighborhood of Sunny Isles, once a sleepy bastion of mom-and-pop motels and souvenir shops but now boasting properties from Trump and Le Meridien.
But the biggest buzz on Miami’s hotel scene this year isn’t something new, but renewed—the mid-2008 reopening of the fabled Fontainebleau hotel following a $1 billion expansion and renovation. A landmark symbol of Miami Beach since its 1954 debut, the venerable property has always been an impressive sight with its distinctive Chateau and Versailles towers rising over the sand, but now it promises to usher in a new era for meetings and conventions in the Magic City, with 58 meeting rooms totaling 107,000 square feet of function space, all set within a 10-minute shuttle ride from the Miami Beach Convention Center.
“The Fontainebleau is going to be terrific for us as we solicit shoulder business; they’re coming up with blocks of rooms of a thousand, and we have not had that for a number of years,” says Ita Moriarty, senior vice president of convention sales for the Greater Miami CVB.
In addition, the Fontainebleau’s longtime neighbor and partner in Rat Pack history, the Eden Roc, has been undergoing its own transformation, adding a 283-room tower and revamping its existing 349 guest rooms; it is due to reopen this summer.
“Collectively, we’re going to have over 2,000 rooms between two hotels, side by side, which is very significant as we go out to the marketplace, not just for citywides but any corporate meeting that needs overflow,” Moriarty says. “In the 20 years I’ve been here, there has not been such an offering as far as space, newness, facilities, and the whole ambience of the properties.”
As the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc are poised to once again dominate Miami’s Mid-Beach area, the city’s downtown region continues its emergence as a major center for meetings and conventions. Completing a $20 million renovation of its 612 guest rooms this month is the Hyatt Regency Miami, home to 27 meeting and function rooms, including a 12,000-square-foot ballroom, 28,000 square feet of exhibit space and the 444-seat Ashe Auditorium.
Heading to the media and entertainment district on the north side of downtown Miami, the old Radisson Miami—currently incarnated as the Miami Biscayne Bay Hotel—is due to rebrand as a Hilton, Moriarty reports, joining a cluster of bayside hotel towers that are within walking distance of the new Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, which itself has a number of distinctive venues for meeting groups, from lavish auditoriums to private salons and outdoor plazas.
“The Carnival Center has gentrified that whole hotel area,” Moriarty says. “It’s such a wonderful add-on to any incoming convention.”
Speaking of add-ons, Miami International Airport has a whopper: the new 1.7 million-square-foot South Terminal. Featuring a passenger-friendly design with moving walkways, the new terminal houses 19 airlines and 61 new food, retail and duty-free locations, as well as a new bus station for cruise and tour passengers, 150 ticket counters, two new security checkpoints and a new customs area capable of serving up to 2,000 passengers per hour.
“It’s quite an impressive facility, and it’s very efficient,” notes Ginny Gutierrez, the CVB’s director of community relations.
With 95 percent of visitors to Greater Miami arriving by air, Moriarty says the airport also will be the gateway to a customer service training program launched by the CVB last fall—“Miami Belongs to Me”—with classes and other training procedures for cabbies, hotel personnel and other travel industry workers.
“We have to re-educate the community on what tourism and conventions mean to us,” she says. “It will be far-reaching and it will start at the airport, because if visitors have a bad experience there, it can affect their entire stay.”
Fort Lauderdale
As the Miami CVB gets the word on customer service out to fellow Miamians, Fort Lauderdale is letting the world know about an utterly transformed accommodations landscape that includes the introduction of such luxury brands as St. Regis, W and Trump International, while longtime resorts like Gallery One Fort Lauderdale and the Hyatt Regency Bonaventure Conference Center & Spa have completed major renovations—to the tune of $25 million and $100 million, respectively.
“These renovations and new properties are furthering Greater Fort Lauderdale as a viable luxury destination in the eyes of meeting planners,” says Christine Tascione, director of convention sales for the Greater Fort Lauderdale CVB.
“You have two great brands right there on the beach,” she adds, referring to the new St. Regis and the newly completed Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort.
Luxury properties are becoming so prevalent, in fact, that the CVB has grouped them under a new brand name—Lauderdale Luxe—and launched a microsite at www.sunny.org to spotlight the new properties and allow planners to submit RFPs.
Tascione hastens to add, though, that luxury is only part of the story in Fort Lauderdale.
“It’s a multifaceted destination,” she says. “We’ve expanded our offerings to approach different market segments that we previously haven’t been synonymous with—the board meetings, retreats and incentive programs that tend to require more upscale luxury properties. Along with that, we’ve continued to focus strongly on our core business, which is corporate meetings, state, regional and national associations, and annual meetings.”
To that end, the county has approved construction of a 1,000-room headquarters hotel adjacent to the Broward County Convention Center, a project recently awarded to Hilton, which beat out Starwood and Gaylord, according to Tascione.
“We’re nearing completion of the negotiations. It’s exciting,” she says. “It’s really going to be beautiful.”
Easy to believe, considering that the property is being designed by the local superstar architecture firm, Arquitectonica, of American Airlines Arena and Bronx Museum fame. In addition to its eye-catching form, though, the new hotel will be extremely functional when it opens in early 2012, offering more than 70,000 square feet of meeting space to complement the 600,000-square-foot center itself as well as the extensive meeting space found at the Fort Lauderdale Grande, which is located right across the street.
“Coupled with the outstanding properties we have in the greater convention center area, we’ll be ideally positioned to accommodate more and larger groups,” Tascione notes.
More construction doesn’t necessarily spell danger for the environment, however, as the new Hilton has already been awarded a silver certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).
Green has definitely earned top-of-mind awareness in this land of Blue Wave beaches, inspiring the CVB to launch a virtual meeting planner’s guide in 2008, www.sunny.org/meetingplanners, along with a redesigned online toolbox kit that includes photos, logos, video clips, and other elements planners can use to promote attendance.
“We still have printed guides and collateral materials like postcards and brochures, but with the green trend, planners are looking for things they can send to attendees that don’t require printing and mailing,” Tascione says.
For More Info
Greater Fort Lauderdale CVB 954.765.4466
www.sunny.org
Greater Miami CVB 305.539.3084
www.miamiandbeaches.com
