Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 Florida's Sports Coast Annual Report – Destination Management Organization – To Provide an Update on Economic Impact, Visitor Profile, Marketing, Sports Tourism, Sales Activities, and Industry Trends for Activities Performed by the Destination Management Organization in FY 2025

26:36Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Adam Thomas Torresman Director. This is an inf uh information presentation and it's gonna be pretty quick. I'll try to get uh through this as fast as uh Connor can beat me in a foot race. So

26:51So in years past we always looked at the the big numbers, the big wow factors and and instead of boring you with all of the the great impact that our industry does, we thought that it would be great for us to to actually look at the programming of of how we're positioning and creating demand in the marketplace for for Pasco County. So this is who we are, we're just north of of of uh this who we are as Florida sports coasts and and this is how we kick off uh Our our our relationships, our conversations, our our meetings with uh with potential uh uh consumers

27:21or tour operators. Uh just north of Tampa, you'll find a perfect destination for adventure, relaxation, and everything in between Florida Sports Coast, located just 30 minutes drive from Tampa International Airports, is a vibrant getaway uh that is a perfect compliment complement to Tampa's urban excitement, a place that welcomes you with. Relax with a unique mix of waterfront towns, rural attractions, and environment, natural environments. So we first start off. Um, our our our business is never transactional, it's always relational, and

27:51we go to trade shows around the world actually building the demand for Florida Sports Ghosts in Pasco County. And these are some of the trade shows as an example of the relationships that we're building in market. Florida Huddle. in Florida Encounter are the largest travel and trade show and planner uh shows that Visit Florida puts on on an annual basis and we get to sit down with with tour operators and planners uh over the course of four or five days and and really showcase all the the the great attractions uh the The hotels, the meeting spaces, and the

28:21experiences that we have here. IPW is the largest travel trade show in the United States that we're gonna be going to in 11 days. We're going with Saddlebrook and some of our other partners to actually again tell the story and start drumming up additional business for Pasco County. The Express Conference is a large fam tour with sports international. Rights holders. We use these fam tours to actually showcase the many different attractions and amenities that we have here in Pasco County.

28:51And again, going back to the trade show is the IMX America, which we're meeting with plenty of planners and rights holders to drum up additional association and corporate business for our hotels. International trade shows. This is where the rubber meets the roads for us when we start opening up new markets, especially international. The biggest market that we're really focused on right now is Colombia, with the new flight of Avianca coming in and out of Vogota on a

29:21weekly basis. We see a huge opportunity for our destination to really gain traction, not only in Colombia, but the South. America market. And you can see how we are going to different sports shows across the world to tell everyone in Europe and South America about the great opportunities that lie ahead of them. Sports and Events Europe is an event that we went to Spain and called the World Federation of Calisthenics.

29:52And this is not just calisthenics that you see people doing burpees or jumping jacks or road climbing. These are actually uh athletes that are um pirouetting from bar to bar and flipping. And we held this event a couple months ago at the uh wonderful um uh uh Sunwest Park and and in Hudson and 20 different countries actually came to to Pasco County to compete for uh for a weekend. So again, going into the international trade show, last year we actually went

30:22on the Rhine River. This was actually an event that we got to really showcase our destination to over 600 different travel agents and tour operators on the Rhine River, stopping at 12 different ports. And actually, our room was actually the trade show floor to where we actually decorated our room with all the Pasco. County's activities, the same as ITB trade show. Our sales efforts, uh you can see that we have a big international push when it comes to international sports.

30:53Uh we are the sole sponsor of the Hayabuska dive team that actually trains and uh competes out of Zephyrhills in Pasco County. We are the sponsorship or sponsor of the Colombian Wheelchair Rugby Team, that's a national team that actually won. their uh their national tournament in wheelchair rugby they actually beat Canada actually after Canada lost to us in the the um the Olympics so Canada had a had a really rough time with uh with with sports after after the Olympics

31:24but uh international um the the Florida International Cup uh this is a a huge soccer tournament that we actually partner with um with Florida Premier on and it happens every Saturday single year so our international um reach is actually going from South America from Chile to Argentina, Brazil and other South American countries to compete in Florida's Sports Coast Cup. Uh again, the international sports efforts don't stop. We are continuously um bringing in uh fam tours from around the world to actually tell

31:54the to showcase um the the Pasco County story on the sports stage. These are some of the big events that we hosted in 2025 and I want to kind of pull out the Tampa Bay Christmas invitational because that is beginning to be one of our signature events on an annual basis, bringing in over 4,600 room nights over two weekends. That tournament actually grew from just 30 little old teams that are Division I, Division II, college-ready basketball, female basketball players, to now a two-weekend event in

32:24over 4,600 room nights and generated an economic impact of over $5.1 million. Again, sports is the center uh centerpiece of our existence in in um this thing we like to call tourism. Um and we did about 140 events last year generating close to 40,000 room nights. But I want to call out the Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus of Pasco County real quick because that's your greatest investment as a tourism asset. And I I I want to just showcase some of the uh Some of the highlights that

32:54that we generated uh last year in 2025 since the takeover of the sports campus from our previous operator to uh to parks and recreation, which was a great, great uh partnership. So, 60 events at the Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus generated over 22,804 night room nights uh and had an economic impact of over 25 and a half million dollars. Um, this is actually more than. doubled year over year because if we if we remember correctly the year before we only had 80 around 8900 room nights for the entire

33:25year of the sports campus. So we made that change, we brought it in-house and we generated over 22,000. Year over year, 25 to 26 on Q1, we're actually outpa outpacing that not and surpassing that uh quarter over quarter. Um in 2025, we generated around uh sixty eight hundred room nights for Q1. Uh Q one in this year of twenty twenty-six, we generated close to eleven thousand six hundred. So the facility's doing its job. It's a unique selling proposition that we get to talk about and tout about um uh to all of of

33:55all of our relationships, uh but we're continuing to to to to generate impact.

34:00Adam? Sir. I could just on that one point because it is such an important facility and again infrastructure's everything and sometimes you go to these events, you get a park on the street, et cetera. Are you excited about that possibility of getting that parking garage? What do you think will do for a room rate?

34:14I I think uh so we always we always take a look at the visitor experience, right? How can we increase the visitor experience? Because if we increase the visitor experience, that rate of retention on then coming back to have that same experience is a lot higher. So the parking garage will increase that visitor experience. So absolutely to your point, uh Mr. Chairman, yes, it would it would be beneficial for not only that facility but the surrounding community as well.

34:36I'm excited about it since I spent many weekends at volleyball tournaments in that facility and it's an amazing facility.

34:43So we're refocusing our efforts back on our fam tour, but again, we have three pillars of strategy of how we talk to our audience. One is is through sports tourism efforts. This is uh through our leisure efforts and our scalloping, our Comquat Festival, and our Florida Sports Coast Ale Trail that we actually brought in visitors uh to actually tell that story to publications and uh to their audience on social media and uh travel trade media. So some of the campaigns I told you last year we got a little bit more sophisticated with our media buys and purchases. Um

35:13you can see that our our our summer campaign um is really actively um hitting on the playful um Playful experiences of life as a game. That's based off of our rebrand of the Florida Sports Coast that actually won our c won that award for the audio for the Adrian's awards. But our audience, you can see that we're going after shopping, history, online content consumption, and local spending behavior is the

35:44target approach that we were trying to get our visitors to really click and find out a little bit more about our destination. And you can see our return on ad spend, and that's at ROAS, and every dollar that we spend on marketing brings about $119 back in visitor spending. To Pasco County. So here's the results of some of that engagement for our marketing campaigns. Again, this is just a snapshot over the spring and summer. We have multiple campaigns going at the same time, and this is just an example of what that generated. So you can see that it reached over a

36:14million unique visitors, which total which gives us a 40,000 reach in total visitors actually messaged or engaged. With the messaging of our campaign, and again looking at the return on marketing or return on ad spend is uh every dollar we spend is $119 coming back into the county on visitor spending. This is really cool. This is the first time we actually did some in-flight sponsorship. We did a 15 to 30 second destination video. Uh, we all know that we have a couple hundred people on

36:44these little tubes that fly 30,000 feet in the air, and we have Captain Audience, they can't go anywhere, right? So if they want Wi-Fi, they have to watch this video. So we partnered with uh American Airlines, Jet Blue, and Breeze on inbound flights coming out of those destinations. And you can see the campaign results. Video video completion is over 7,700. So people are engaging, people are watching our destination, and they're learning more about us as a destination. I don't know if this video is going to play Kelly or

37:14is this is gonna play? No

37:21That's okay, we can keep moving forward. Again, this is somewhat just an example of our of our Mobile Fuse spring summer campaign. You can see that there's life, there's engagement, there's there's there's activity, there's excitement going on with our creative. And here is something really cool with Mobile Fuse. We actually had a game where you collected coins and you move the um the hot air balloon up and down, up and down until you actually got three cool. Coins and once you got to three coins, and we actually went to one of our advertising and you got to click and move to our to our website. So a pretty way,

37:51pretty cool of way of enacting or engaging with our audience. And here's some of just the campaign results of Hopper, our travel booking engine. So here's we're partnering with a lot of these booking sites. These book of these bed banks because that's what these tour operators are actually looking for when they're selling to the consumer market. They're looking for hopper, they're looking for hotel beds, expedia,

38:15rate hop. These are bed banks that they're actually buying through the uh the tour operator. We started this last year. It's our newsletter. It actually goes out to the consumer audience that tells you all tells them all about our unique events, festivals, attractions, and many things that's going on on a quarterly basis here in Pasco County. And you can see that we started it in October and the growth pattern is really exponential with over 2,000 opt-in subscribers to our new newsletter. Social media is is has been a great

38:45way to engage and reach audience and new audiences. Um we ended this uh 2025 fiscal year just shy under 18,000 um or a little over 18,000 followers and um on our social media channels. Now I'm happy to say that we're past 22,000 followers on our Instagram, so um we are gaining. gaining traction, we're gaining followers and we're we're we're really making an impression in the marketplace. So, what does that all mean? So, this is this goes back to the impact of our

39:16industry and what we've done for Pasco County over the past year. You can see that the direct spend of over $746 million gets spread out over a wide variety of accommodations, restaurants, groceries, shopping, entertainment, transportation, and other activities once they're in market. So a three-year look back and visitors, room nights, direct spend, and economic impact, you can see that we've grown over the past three years. Took a little blip in 2024, but we've grown year over year in 2025 and

39:4624. Our economic impact last year was around $1.1 billion to Pasco County's economy.

39:54And here's just the occupancy. This is really important. So when developers are reaching out to us, wanted to know what the occupancy, wanted to know what the star report shows, what the market is dictating us, this is actually really good information that we hand to hotel developers. And I just want to thank you again for your support. Um I hope to see you next week on the 14th at our annual tourism banquet. Uh I know some of you might not be able to go, but we'll miss you. But thank you again, Mr. Chairman.

40:19Thank you, Adam. Any questions for

40:22Adam? Just one, Adam, does all this lead to the fact that do we have enough hotels for the people we're bringing in because I mean it's growing and growing but doesn't seem like we're adding hotels very often. So

40:37uh I will tell you this there is some leakage going over to Hillsborough County once we do bring in these big tournaments there we are losing some um some room nights to our partners down south yes sir so there we have about fifty fifty two fifty three hotels in the entire county but again that's just one One lodging segment of the entire visitor economy. We still have vacation rentals, we have uh camps and uh uh camps

41:00and there

41:02is

41:02a need for some more hotels in the area. So there is. Okay. All right, thank you.

41:08Good question. I think it's important that we keep encouraging these hotels 'cause they do so many so much good for us every step of the way. And when you first started here, way back when we had uh a great r uh lacrosse term it was here, but we found out that most hotel nights were going down a Hills Road. Right. Between the I think the hockey coming in, the sports complex coming in, all of a sudden a lot of hotels got built and I think there's still a lot more demand for more to keep that money right here in Pasco County. So

41:31Yeah,