Siesta Beach, Sarasota, Florida

On May 27, 2011, Siesta Beach was declared America’s best beach by Dr. Stephen P. Leatherman, better known as Dr. Beach. Siesta Key had suddenly laid a golden egg for the tourism industry in Sarasota, Florida, that could be valued as high as $446 million.

That’s because the 2011 list was Dr. Beach’s 21st annual list of the top 10 beaches in America and is now a tradition eagerly awaited by television, print and online media.

The day the list gets released just before Memorial Day is pure bedlam, with a flood of news mentions and blog posts, not to mention a viral wave on social media.

Dr. Beach stood on the white sands of Siesta Beach and gave interviews to “Good Morning America” and “The Today Show,” and the story also earned Siesta Key a home page listing on MSN.

The end result of all the free publicity and media profiles of the beach is a 15 to 20 percent increase in annual visitation numbers.

Last year, after Coopers Beach in Southampton, New York, topped the list (Siesta Beach was No. 2 on the 2010 list), it got a 15 percent bump in traffic and a $774,000 beach-access pass revenue increase.

Sarasota CVB making use of Dr Beach listing

Based on the 2.2 million visitors who came to Siesta Beach in 2010, that would mean another 330,000 to 440,000 visitors in 2011.

Sarasota County visitors who book a stay here spend an average of $124 per day and $1,013 overall. So Sarasota is looking at between $334.3 million to $446 million in potential increased tourism revenue.

Also, it makes for some great promotional material for the destination’s tourism marketing bureau.

The Sarasota CVB not only put out a press release touting the recognition, but also is using it on the bureau’s websites home page to entice visitors to “Experience the Best Beach in the USA.”

The CVB also has been quick to take advantage of the rise in search queries for Siesta Beach with Google ads titled “Siesta Beach #1,” which ask visitors to “see why Siesta Beach was ranked as #1 beach in the US by Dr. Beach!”

Siesta Beach Google ad

Siesta Beach has enjoyed the Dr. Beach bump for two years running now, in second and first place. But it’ll never get it again, because once a beach is listed as the best beach in America, it gets taken out of contention in subsequent years. But right now, Siesta Beach is getting ready with beach pails and shovels to collect the tourist dollars.

Beach photo – Clexow; Snapshots - Sarasota CVB website & UpTake Siesta Key page

Related posts:
Q&A With Dr. Beach aka Dr. Stephen Leatherman
Dr. Beach Speaks: Coopers Beach Best of 2010

The number of visitors to the United States’ national parks dropped slightly from 285.6 million recreation visits in 2009 to 281.3 million in 2010.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was once again the most visited park, with Grand Canyon a distant second and Yosemite in third place. Here’s the full list of the top 10 most visited national parks in 2010, with annual recreational visitation numbers provided by the National Park Service (NPS).

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Great Smoky Mountains National Park – 9,463,538
Grand Canyon National Park – 4,388,386
Yosemite National Park – 3,901,408
Yellowstone National Park – 3,640,185
Rocky Mountain National Park – 2,955,821
Olympic National Park – 2,844,563
Grand Teton National Park – 2,669,374
Zion National Park – 2,665,972
Acadia National Park – 2,504,208
Cuyahoga Valley National Park – 2,492,670

Almost all the parks maintained visitation numbers at or near 2009 levels. Visitation at the Smokies, for instance, was at 9.46 million in 2010 compared to 9.49 million in 2010.

But park visitation patterns in the Smokies have shifted, and some of it can be attributed to changing weather patterns. Is global warming impacting tourism in the Smokies?

“A number of anomalies occurred in park visitation this year that may explain the visitor use patterns we received,” said park superintendent Dale Ditmanson. “Extreme weather in 2010 left its mark on Great Smoky Mountains National Park from a cold chilling winter to sweltering heat in summer.”

Above average snowfall shutdown the park’s roads repeatedly from January through March and again in December. Summer brought a string of 90-degree and higher temperatures, and August registered above-average highs. The Smokies’ famed fall foliage peaked in October instead of its usual November peak.

The Great Smoky Mountains is also the only national park in the NPS top 10 most visited sites list. Of all the sites managed by the NPS, the most visited one is the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Blue Ridge Parkway

Blue Ridge Parkway – 14,517,118
Golden Gate National Recreation Area (NRA) – 14,271,503
Great Smoky Mountains – 9,463,538
Gateway NRA – 8,820,757
Lake Mead NRA – 7,080,758
George Washington Memorial – 6,925,099
Lincoln Memorial – 6,042,315
Natchez Trace Parkway – 5,910,950
Delaware Water Gap NRA – 5,285,761
Cape Cod National Seashore – 4,653,706

The NPS has more than 21,500 employees and had a FY 2010 budget of $3.16 billion. It has requested $3.14 billion for FY 2011.

Daily entrance fees dropped from $84.5 million in 2009 to $78.5 million in 2010. The overall fees collected by the NPS also dropped to $125.77 million in 2010, as compared to $129.64 in 2009.

But the park fees are minuscule compared to the $11.89 billion that visitors spent in 2009 at local gateway regions within roughly 60 miles of the park. This spending by park visitors on hotels, meals, activities and car rentals supports 247,000 jobs.

The visitation numbers may soon see a big uptick if President Obama’s Great Outdoors initiative gets its full $900 million funding for land and water conservation that it requested.

One of the components of the “America’s Great Outdoors” initiative, announced on Feb. 16, 2011 by the President, includes enhancing recreational access and opportunities, and establishing a Federal Interagency Council on Outdoor Recreation (FICOR).

FICOR would coordinate recreation management, access and policies across multiple agencies, and promote www.recreation.gov as a one-stop portal for information and resources about federal outdoor recreation.

Smoky National Park photo courtesy NPS; Blue Ridge Parkway – public domain (source)

Related posts:
America The Beautiful–Recreational Park and Land Annual Pass
10 Cool Things for Kids in Yellowstone National Park
Arches National Park in Utah

The Ethical Traveler alliance has done its best to nail Jell-o to the wall this month, by naming the top 10 most ethical countries folks can travel to in their journeys. The U.S.-based group defines ethical as “best at protecting their natural environments, promiting responsible trave, and building a tourism industry that provides real benefits to local communities.”

The U.S. didn’t make that list (after all, it’s not a developing country) , and some that did could raise an eyebrow or two:

Ethical travel involves environment

Argentina

Belize

Chile

Ghana

Lithuania

Namibia

Poland

Seychelles

South Africa

Suriname

“Now is the perfect time for savvy travelers and well-intentioned governments to evolve together, each encouraging the other. This is especially true in the developing world, where travel and tourism can be developed as lucrative, low-impact alternatives to forestry, mining and the destruction of ocean habitats,” says executive director Jeff Greenwald in a prepared statement.

Costa Rica fail

Countries that have fallen off the list since it last emerged in 2008: Bolivia, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Coatia, Estonia, Nicaragua. Back in 2006, the list included Brazil, Barbados, Ecuador, Kenya, Peru. Slovenia, Sri Lanka and Uruguay. Executives here say they use past and present information “so that we may understand not only the current state of a country but its forward path. This helps us select countries that are actively improving the state of their people and environment.” They concentrate on three categories in general: environmental protection, social welfare and human rights.

Ethical Traveler itself says some countries like Croatia and Estonia are no longer considered developing nations (which makes me wonder how Argentina feels about being on that list now) and thus lost their eligibility, and Costa Rica, which was strongly recommended just two years ago, is now known for sexual predators of children. More of their reasoning can be found at The Developing World’s 10 Best Ethical Decisions. But being big on common sense myself, when the top 10 begins to diverge this drastically and this quickly, it tells me the organization itself is either flighty in its initial research or its standards are not in touch with reality. Many times such lists are a big advertising vehicle to drum up visitors to different destinations, although the organization does not offer promotions on its site, so I threw out that explanation.

What is your call?

Photography: Julie Sturgeon