Sunshine Matters

VISIT FLORIDA recently hosted a group media familiarization (FAM) tour for four top-tier travel bloggers targeting domestic (U.S) consumers.  Hosting influential media on FAMS allows the journalists or influencers to personally experience the Florida product in order to gather content for their publications, and inspire their readers and followers to visit the Sunshine State.  Each year, the majority of Florida’s visitors come from the United States – 91.2 million in 2015.  With a loaded nine-day itinerary and 13 hour days, VISIT FLORIDA and our Partners set out to ensure the media learned about all of the great experiences Florida has to offer.

In correlation with one of VISIT FLORIDA’s marketing campaigns, the FAM tour focused on “Florida Firsts.”  This theme encourages visitors to experience those important and highly-memorable first-time life events right here in the Sunshine State, taking in Florida’s exciting attractions and theme parks, beautiful beaches and enticing off-the-beaten-path adventures that await at every turn.

The four participating bloggers representing popular travel blogs included Rachel Jones from Hippie in Heels, Tamara Gruber from We3Travel, Joann Woolley from Travel Mamas and Erin Bender – who was recently featured on Business Insider – from Travel with Bender.  Collectively, their blogs reach more than 400,000 unique readers per month and have more than 220,000 social media followers.

Together with our Partners, we were able to showcase four Florida destinations: Central Florida, Orlando, Space Coast and The Palm Beaches.  The tour began with a day at LEGOLAND and Safari Wilderness, where the group had the unique opportunity to feed lemurs.  The next stop was Orlando, where they explored some of Disney’s new features including “The Jungle Book: Alive with Magic” nighttime show at Animal Kingdom, the new “Soarin Around the World” at Epcot, and the new “Star Wars Launch Bay” at Hollywood Studios.  The group also enjoyed the breathtaking views of Orlando during their ride on the Orlando Eye.

Following Orlando, we headed over to the Space Coast where the group enjoyed the most Florida-unique experience of the entire tour: watching an Atlas V rocket launch from the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex. Finally, the tour ended in West Palm Beach where the group explored the beautiful beaches and scenery of Palm Beach, and the energetic nighttime atmosphere of Clematis Street.  While these were some of the highlights, the tour also covered many more attractions, activities, hotels and restaurants.

The itinerary was so well received by the group that each of the bloggers is planning to write more blogs than anticipated.  We are estimating 16 blog posts to be published within the next few months, garnering more than 6 million impressions.  To date, more than 200 posts have been shared on social media, earning more than 5.5 million impressions.

VISIT FLORIDA would like to thank the four Partners who helped coordinate and plan this FAM tour: Visit Central Florida, Visit Orlando, Visit Space Coast and The Palm Beaches CVB.

For more information about VISIT FLORIDA’s FAM tours, please contact me at sgilhousen@visitflorida.org.