Sunshine Matters

With today marking the start of the 2015 Hurricane Season, I wanted to share the resources and action steps VISIT FLORIDA has developed to ensure Florida’s visitors have access to consistent, real-time, statewide information.  It is our hope that these efforts will allow our visitors to make the most informed travel planning decisions possible in preparation for a potential weather threat that might impact the state.

Each spring, VISIT FLORIDA’s crisis management response team re-addresses our Hurricane Crisis Preparedness Plan, updating it as needed and ensuring it is ready to implement.  Additional steps taken in advance of this year’s hurricane season include:

• Working closely with the Florida Division of Emergency Management to align our response steps
• Revamping and testing our consumer messaging response efforts on VISITFLORIDA.com, including the Travel Alert and supporting Travel Advisory page offering official state resources for visitors, mapped links to official DMO Twitter feeds, webcam and video postings, as well as the new #FloridaNow social feed
• Testing our Emergency Accommodations Module (EAM) activation process which allows us to provide statewide accommodations availability on VISITFLORIDA.com, our mobile site and the state’s FloridaEvacuates.com website should a major evacuation order impacting visitors be declared within the state
• Hosting a webinar with accommodations businesses and DMOs to ensure they are fully trained on how to populate the EAM should the need arise
• Updating the Hurricane Information page within our Crisis Preparation section on VISITFLORIDA.org which provides resources to our partners in the Florida tourism industry
• Verifying information for all our county DMO tourism contacts should we need to mobilize the industry

VISIT FLORIDA is proud to play the vital role of serving as a liaison between the hyper-local information that our tourism partners have in each community and the visitors and emergency responders who need those details in order to make decisions.  Remaining in regular contact with state emergency officials and tourism industry representatives ensure we are able to share the very latest updates through our consumer website, our mobile site and the staff at our five Official Florida Welcome Centers.

Visitors looking for the latest weather or travel updates will find that information on the VISITFLORIDA.com home page in an alert box activated as an orange ribbon at the top of the screen whenever a potential crisis situation arises.  A link from there takes users to a page with many more resources we’ve compiled, including:

• Live local updates from DMOs via Twitter
• Live webcam feeds from tourism destinations around the state
• Videos created by VISIT FLORIDA content team featuring first non-impacted areas and later impacted areas once recovered
• Aggregate feed of social media posts that include #FloridaNow
• Florida Emergency Information 24-hour Hotline
• Florida 511 road closure information
• Links to the National Hurricane Center and Florida Division of Emergency Management websites

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our industry partners, whose willingness to be involved in our crisis response programs and diligence in providing the vital local information in real time makes VISIT FLORIDA’s efforts so much more robust.