• July 1, 2011

Visit Florida, the state's official tourism marketing corporation has tapped Tony Lapi, CEO of the 'Tween Waters Inn Island Resort on Captiva Island, to be 2011-12 chairman of its board.  Lapi succeeds Ed Fouché, senior vice president-travel industry sales for Disney Destinations, who served as chairman for an unprecedented two-year stint.

Fouché held the position during what was probably the toughest time for the state's tourism in anyone's memory, when BP's Deepwater Horizon spill made worldwide news and Florida, while spared an environmental catastrophe, did not dodge the PR bullet. Visit Florida responded with an award-winning social-media campaign that let visitors and citizens do the talking, making the organization's consumer-facing website, VisitFlorida.com a virtual community board for visitors and citizens to post real-time commentary and video assets taken from beaches around the state, proving that the state's crown jewels were still pristine.

The gambit -- letting people speak for the state rather than the tourism organization itself doing all the talking -- along with a new airport on the panhandle, other marketing initiatives in snow-bird urban centers like New York, and -- paradoxically -- the recession (which may well have kept pond-hopping tourists in the states) helped keep tourism relatively salutary during both the environmental crisis and the recession.