On the eve of Florida Tourism’s annual governors’ conference, held in Tampa this year, the group’s CEO released a short, and likely scripted, statement explaining why he had quietly removed the LGBTQ+ travel section from the organization’s website.
“It’s pretty simple: Visit Florida is a taxpayer-funded organization, and therefore Visit Florida’s marketing strategy, materials and content must align with state policy,” said Dana Young, CEO of Visit Florida.
Young’s clarification came nearly a week after the organization faced national criticism for removing dozens of pages about LGBTQ+ travel, including a landing page that promoted Florida beaches as “attractive to people of all sexual orientations, but especially to the gay community seeking a sense of belonging and acceptance.”
Despite the questions, Visit Florida has remained silent about removing the links.
On a recent Tuesday, investigative reporter Katie LaGroni met Young in person at the Tampa Convention Center, where the Governors’ Tourism Conference was scheduled to begin on Thursday.
“Katie, I’m not going to talk about this right now,” Ms. Young said as she walked away from Ms. LaGrone.
Last year, Florida welcomed more than 140 million out-of-state visitors, a state record, according to Visit Florida, which bills itself as the state’s official tourism marketing agency but is not a government agency. However, its budget relies heavily on state funding each year. This year, Visit Florida received $80 million from state sources.
In a brief statement, Young said the group needed to align itself with the state, but added that “the state has always been and always will be a welcoming state, as evidenced by our tourism numbers.”
“It doesn’t make sense from a business perspective,” said Rachel Covello, an LGBTQ travel blogger from St. Petersburg who first discovered the missing link about a month ago.
“LGBTQ people who live in or travel to Florida are led to believe that the state doesn’t really care about us,” Covello said.
Covello said she reached out to the Florida Tourism Board for answers but didn’t get an explanation for why the link was removed. On Wednesday, she attended the organization’s board meeting in Tampa hoping for substantive answers, but left disappointed.
“It was a very blanket, superficial response,” she said. “They say they’re following the administration’s directive, but everyone is welcome in Florida. That doesn’t make any sense,” Covello said. She has started a petition calling for Visit Florida to put the page back on its website.
“This is not the answer, and I really believe that the people of Florida, and all hard-working people, deserve answers,” said Marianne Ferentz, a Tampa small business owner and former Visit Florida board member. Ferentz expressed disappointment in the removal of LGBTQ-related materials from the Visit Florida website during public comment and left the meeting with further questions.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “So much money and effort has been put into these campaigns, and it just doesn’t make sense. I mean, if this is the No. 1 industry, why are they doing this? If this is an economic decision, it’s not a very good one.”
Earlier today, Governor Ron DeSantis answered questions about the page being removed from the Visit Florida website. He said he was unaware of it until after the fact, but he did not change his message that Florida is not a state that puts people into categories and that everyone is welcome.
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