Visit Tampa Bay<\/a> officials say the 2025 numbers were unusually high because many local residents were staying in hotels after the 2024 hurricanes. When comparing 2026 to 2024 \u2014 two more typical tourism years \u2014 the Tampa area saw growth of just over 1%.<\/p>\nVisit Tampa Bay CEO Santiago Corrada presented the 2026 tourism report to Hillsborough County commissioners. He said Tampa continues to face challenges from higher travel costs nationwide, but the region is better positioned than some other major destinations.<\/p>\n
Corrada said cities such as New York, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles rely more heavily on international visitors, while Tampa\u2019s tourism base is more domestic.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re not as dependent on international visitation,\u201d Corrada said. \u201cSo we make up for it with domestic travel, conventions, meetings, events, sports, film, all the other pieces that we have in our puzzle. So again, yes, we’re in great shape compared to some of those destinations that are dealing with international visitations being down to the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n
Visit Tampa Bay says the region has seen tourism growth year over year dating back to 2013, with the exception of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
One of the biggest challenges now is finding enough space for visitors to stay. Since 2013, Visit Tampa Bay says the area has added only about 4,100 hotel rooms, despite major tourism growth.<\/p>\n
There are hotel projects in the pipeline, including one underway in downtown Tampa and another planned for the Channel District.<\/p>\n
However, adding hotel rooms quickly can be difficult because of financing challenges and the amount of time it takes to complete major hotel developments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 Visit Tampa Bay says the region\u2019s tourism industry remains strong, even though a first look…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[274,558,276,2635,2287,115,135,137,136,278],"class_list":["post-434726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-app-top-stories","tag-business","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-jason-lanning","tag-local-politics","tag-news","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}