If tourists lacked good reasons for visiting the Greater Fort Lauderdale area in 2025, they probably have a few in mind by now.

The prominent South Florida tourism destination, still a.k.a. Broward County, captured a spectrum of precious moments in the worldwide media spotlight late Thursday as it became the focus of a major campaign launch by Visit Lauderdale, the county tourism marketing agency, on CNN’s New Year’s Eve Live with Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen.

Stacy Ritter, an elated CEO and president of Visit Lauderdale, said the show probably will be one of the agency’s most productive sponsorships ever, based on the viewership.  “That’s going to be a very positive return on investment,” she told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Friday.

Ritter said it took months to plan the agency’s participation as a presenting sponsor of the CNN telecast, designed to be the launchpad of its 2026 global marketing campaign, “Never Lose Your Splash” — an allusion to the area’s 24 miles of beaches and Venice-like matrix of waterways.

She had no immediate information on the cost.

But for the area, the CNN broadcast was a PR double-play: While cameras rolled aboard a yacht at the Pier Sixty-Six Resort on the Intracoastal Waterway in Fort Lauderdale, a performance by Colombian superstar entertainer Shakira unfolded at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino complex in Hollywood.

“They mentioned it was in Hollywood,” Ritter said of the Shakira segment. “That was also a serious benefit.”

For three hours, Visit Lauderdale’s logo appeared on screen, rotating with those of other major sponsors. At the same time, digital Visit Lauderdale ads popped up on Times Square billboards. Those ads, along with others yet to be released, will continue through the first quarter of this year.

“On balance, we thought it was a really smart and successful way to launch the campaign,” Ritter said.

All about the water

The campaign, the agency said in a statement distributed ahead of the broadcast, was designed to “inspire first-time visitors and returning travelers,” and encourage them “to reconnect with what makes them feel most alive — and to find it here, where sunshine, water and joy flow freely.”

During the evening, CNN aired a live, three-minute broadcast from the recently reopened Pier Sixty-Six on 17th Street Causeway aboard a yacht at the resort’s marina.

Ahead of the Cooper-Cohen broadcast, Isabel Rosales, a network correspondent, toured the vessel live, delivering an unedited narrative about the Fort Lauderdale area on the network’s app. She interviewed resort executives, and hit touchstone phrases important to Fort Lauderdale such as “Yachting Capital of the World,” “Venice of America,” “24 miles of golden beaches” and a phrase from a continuing marketing initiative launched in 2022, “Everyone Under the Sun.”

A low-profile beach destination?

That many would-be tourists are uninformed about the area’s water-centric amenities and stately beachfront hotels is somewhat of a curiosity.

But as 2025 unfolded, the agency’s marketing professionals conducted a survey of 2,000 residents and non-residents of Florida and encountered some surprisingly negative results.

In August, Camila Clark, the agency’s senior vice president of marketing and communications, told a meeting of Broward County’s Tourist Development Council that “people do not choose us as a beach destination,” according to minutes of the council meeting that summarized her remarks.

“The research found that 40% of non-Florida residents are not familiar with the destination,” the summary added, “while 58% of Florida residents who are familiar with the destination would rather visit other places in Florida.”

“Our existing brand platform does not create enough distinction for us,” the summary said. “We have a lot of repeat visitors but need to reach new visitors.  Visit Lauderdale’s audience falls into the luxury travel category. We are leaning into the concept that suggests that being near, in or on the water can make you happier, healthier and more connected and better at what you do.”

In an interview Tuesday, Ritter suggested that natural and manmade amenities that are obvious to Fort Lauderdale-area residents are not so obvious to would-be visitors. And that’s after multiple decades of college Spring Breaks, condo and hotel building booms, COVID-era relocations and never-ending replays of the iconic 1960 on-location film “Where the Boys Are.”

“I think we have a different perception of our home than our visitors do,” Ritter said. “You have to take off your resident’s hat and look at it through the eyes of the visitors.”

“Part of the problem is that there is no word ‘beach’ in our name,” Ritter added. The word “Fort” in Fort Lauderdale also has a tendency to “throw people off.”

“We wanted to re-establish our place in the beach destination segment,” she said of the newly launched “Splash” campaign.

State visitation holds steady

Visit Lauderdale’s plunge into the global spotlight came as Visit Florida, the statewide tourism agency, announced a relatively modest year-over-year increase for statewide visitation in the third quarter of this year.

The state agency announced Wednesday that an estimated 34.3 million domestic and foreign travelers visited the state in the third quarter of this year, up 0.3% from the same period of 2024. Through the nine months ended Sept. 30, 109.8 million people visited the state, an increase of 0.1% over 2024.

“Florida tourism remains strong and leads the nation,” said Bryan Griffin, president and CEO of Visit Florida.

“Preliminary estimates show that domestic travelers accounted for 91.7 percent of all visitors, with 31.5 million Americans traveling to Florida” during the quarter, the agency said in the statement.

Visitation from overseas grew 3.2% from the third quarter of last year, to reach 2.3 million.

But Canadian visitation — a category that the agency segregates from “overseas” visitors — remains problematic. The agency said 507,000 Canadians came to Florida in the third quarter, a sharp decline of 15% versus 2024. Through the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2.25 million Canadians visited the state, down 15.5%, according to the agency’s own statistics.

The agency offered no comments about the state of Canadian visitation, which has been dogged all year by political and economic tensions between the U.S. and Canadian governments. Canadians traditionally rank as the top international source of tourism in the state, according to Visit Florida statistics.

But the agency did highlight “continued elevated visitation from Latin American countries like Brazil, which has climbed nearly 5%” year over year in the third quarter.

Griffin said the agency is “strategically focused on growing visitation from Latin America and Europe and maintaining Florida’s #1 market share of domestic tourists, and our strategy is working.”

The economy weighs heavily

Ritter said Greater Fort Lauderdale is “only down a couple of points in Canadian travel, which is very positive for us.”

Stepping back to assess the broader picture, she believes the economy is the greatest factor dictating traveler decisions.

“I think there was Florida fatigue after COVID,” she said. “I think today my worries are more about the economy and how the economy is impacting travelers not traveling, and instability politically, which is also seriously affecting travelers from the international side.”

“Things like stricter visa requirements and additional fees to apply for a visa — those types of things depress travel,” she said.

“There are some Florida destinations that are  up — most are not right now,” she added. “Every travelers’ sentiment survey we see is that the economy weighs heavily on people’s minds and their pocketbooks and then traveling less because of it.”

All the more reason to be proactive in promoting the destination. The agency continues to sponsor trips to targeted U.S. cities and to international destinations like Brazil to spread the message about the Fort Lauderdale area.

Houston, Cleveland and Cincinnati are among the cities to be visited this year, while the Northeast including the New York metropolitan area remains the No. 1 traditional source to be mined for visitors.

And the agency expects the area will benefit from a number of events this year that will be significant draws to the area. They include the national championship college football game at the Hard Rock Stadium, which will coincide with a local food and wine festival this month.

From the game, Ritter expects a “Taylor Swift” effect, where Fort Lauderdale-area hotels will garner a generous share of visitors who attend the event. She was referring to the superstar entertainer’s three concerts last October at the Hard Rock. The hotels north of the Broward-Miami-Dade County border, she said, drew 49% of the room nights from Swift’s trio of appearances.

“The same kind of effect will take place for the national championship,” college game, Ritter said Friday. “It’s the same week as the food and wine festival. The idea is to promote a longer stay.”

In May, the remodeled Broward County Convention Center and newly opened 801-room Omni Hotel will be center stage for the nonprofit  U.S. Travel Association’s annual IPW 2026 networking event. It’s expected to draw thousands of international travel industry professionals and journalists to Fort Lauderdale.

“This industry is still very heavily invested in person-to-person contact,” Ritter said. “That’s where we get the biggest bang for our buck.”

A broader message Ritter has consistently delivered also remains in play: Everyone is welcome to Greater Fort Lauderdale.

“We are the same as we have always been,” she said. “We are a very diverse community and a very welcoming people. We’re not going to stop.”