People thinking about relocating inland from coastal Florida to avoid the trials of sea-level rise will show up first as visitors. This raises the question about how and when will inland destination marketing organizations (DMOs) adjust their marketing to address these potential homebuyers. It’s a mistake to leave this different sort of visitors to real estate interests alone.
Will these visitors think they’re engaged in leisure travel in any way? I don’t believe they will automatically. Even for those of us totally put off by mass tourism, how this plays out will greatly affect how we evaluate new norms about leisure travel, first inside Florida and then beyond.
We need to think first like a DMO and ask, why should we reasonably want people relocating inland to consider themselves as leisure travelers at all?
If they’re just coming to look at houses that they’ve already shortlisted with an agent, is the trip just to look, see and make an offer? In that case, overnights spent in their candidate towns will likely benefit Airbnb and VRBO.
But there’s added reason why DMOs should want these visitors to think of themselves as part of leisure travel.
This can position these places advantageously in a much larger approach to the new normal of travel in our epoch of climate action. I refer to this new norm as Travel To the Deep Nearby, which led me to launch these postings a year ago. Essentially, Travel To the Deep Nearby is travel by the least polluting transportation, which takes place with a high degree of authoritative interpretation that in turn lets you grasp where you are as a local. And so you should consider places that hold themselves out for these values, like National Parks, National Heritage Areas, legacy hotels, and places on The New York Times 52 List that should soon be out for 2024.
To capture this purpose-driven market, DMOs might want to partner with a nonprofit like The Nature Conservancy, that will teach them to work with scientists, or other local advocacy organizations. Even if COP 28 were to surprise everyone with a clear call backed up by funding for top level climate action, public pressure on the travel trade will call for new information sources that assure visitors that their travels are not just so much dirty laundry fed into the inexhaustible greenwashing machine. This isn’t just for Africa and the Global South alone.
DMOs would want these visitors because they already know that the disparity of wealth between coastal dwellers and those who live inland skews favorably to those that live closer to shore beaches and ocean views. They arrive with more money to spend.
Consider inland Florida for a coastal dweller
Apart from theme parks of Orlando and surrounding Orange County, a few inland towns still offer hotels of luxurious comfort, though lodgings are mostly about convenience while driving the Interstates, which are hardly the best choices for learning about places. Real estate agents can get granular about local neighborhoods. Local tour operators can also be helpful, and of course so can Main Street offices and nonprofits that represent conservation and heritage interests. Chambers of Commerce? Maybe ask there about schools.
The question is how newcomers will adjust.
There’s Orlando with its well-endowed neighborhoods and arts scene, Winter Park that’s home to Rollins College and many civic institutions plus a beloved farmers market. Gainesville, the home of the University of
Florida, is intellectually dynamic. But other places are mostly small like DeLand with some 39,000 people and site of the main campus of Stetson University and an award-winning local newspaper wary about sprawl.
Otherwise, small towns proliferate along the Central Florida — the Lake Wales — Ridge, with its abundance of legacy species endemic from retreat of the last Ice Age that’s studied at the Archbold Biological Station in Venus. Archbold offers a visitors program of talks, tours and trails through the largest known relatively undisturbed tract of contiguous natural communities characteristic of the ridge through Florida’s ancient scrub habitats — to be sure, subtle yet “a place like nowhere else on Earth.”
The Florida National Scenic Trail starts north from the bottom at the highway that connects Miami and Tampa. Fishers flock from both coasts to cast their lines into big Lake Okeechobee, the biggest American pond that doesn’t freeze in winter. A mostly paved trail runs atop its circumferential rim. Gator tail and catfish are on every menu. Five rivers for paddling flow from Green Swamp in Polk County, where nearby on a clear day you can see both coasts from the top of Iron Mountain.
Anyone who has cycled the ridge road or driven with car windows open remembers the intoxicating scent of citrus blossoms in fall, and the fruity thick mash from packing plants. Small farm towns rise on flat ground among the hills and lakes that thrived before citrus greening devastated 80 percent of the state’s crop. The citrus tower in Lake Placid was repurposed in 2003 to benefit regional cell phone transmissions. Its older standing counterpart in Clermont remains open but subdivisions have replaced groves in its viewshed.
Lake Placid has bloomed as a world capital of caladium farms that show peak color in July, and otherwise stands out as an early American mural city. Sebring claims its history of racing cars and its still grand pink stucco hotel from 1926 that could reopen in 2025. The Inn on the Lake is a 3-star property.
Avon Park claims the low-slung 1920s old brick Hotel Jacaranda once owned by three Ann Rand followers, now by the South Florida State College Foundation. The high-standard Mission Inn and Resort in Howey-In-the-Hills stands as a legacy masterpiece in the once popular chain of lakes district where fishing lured visitors for decades before the waters became toxic to wildlife from citrus pesticide runoff.
Lakeland ranks as a City Beautiful from the 1920s, its special civic endowments sponsored by Publix that’s headquartered here, its campus of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings at Florida Southern University, and its own legacy 11-story Lakeland Terrace Hotel, now flagged by Hilton’s Curio Collection, and its high-design railroad station overlooking downtown’s central lake.
Mount Dora remains Florida’s favorite boutique town, where its Lakeside Inn on the shore of Lake Dora, where I launched the state bed-and-breakfast nonprofit in 1980 when the inn was 97 years old, which ranks it as Florida’s oldest continuously operating hotel. It keeps getting better.
Lake Wales is the home of the Bok Singing Tower and Gardens and with a Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. plan from the early 20th century that’s finally getting built out and that I’ll write about in the new year. Palatka connects multimodal trails in all directions and celebrates William Bartram in Florida.
White Springs and the tee up of leisure travel as climate change
Will the coastal newcomers fit in or try to change everything to create the fantasy-driven tourist mania of the lower coasts that constantly gets remade by over-the-top resorts, convention centers, high-tech performance halls and glam shopping districts?
People have been moving inland from the coasts for at least 150 years but not necessarily for beneficial climate action. Some have come to help build strong communities, others to entreat railroaders and others that promised to drain inland waters for land development and otherwise to enrich themselves.
The man who would become Florida’s 19th Governor left Jacksonville during the Civil War to escape Union troops. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward relocated west 75 miles to the vicinity known as the Woodpecker Route north from White Springs. After the war, Broward’s return to Jacksonville launched his political rise with his controversial aims to rid Florida of its freed Blacks and to drain the Everglades.
Other coastal dwellers would later turn White Springs into Florida’s earliest model of how Travel To the Deep Nearby would work as beneficial climate action.
(To be continued.)
