Tampa Marketing to Queer Travelers

The Tampa Bay area is a great getaway for the queer traveler, affording the best of urban life, star attractions, a great food scene, access to the waterfront and nearby beaches.

We spoke recently with Stephanie Fred, head of Public Relations for Visit Tampa Bay, to ask her about how her visitor’s bureau markets to and attracts this oft-desired segment of travelers.

TP: How important is the queer traveler segment to Visit Tampa Bay?

SF: The LGBTQ community is an important one to us. We treat that sector as if it were a domestic market or a key international market, that’s how important it is to us.

In a lot of ways, they’re actually the perfect traveler. They don’t mind spending a little more for a hotel to have a great experience, and they don’t mind going to the attractions and upgrading on a quick queue or a safari tour at somewhere like Busch Gardens. Also, we’re a very inclusive area; anyone who’s visited Ybor City would agree!

TP: How are you marketing to this audience?

SF: We’ve done a lot of advertising, especially digital ads, that are geared more towards the LGBTQ market—whether that be through in-app activations or through certain websites. This year, we stepped it up a notch with our new LGBTQ visitor’s guide, called “Visit Tampa Gay.” It’s a nice play on words, and it’s essentially our original visitor’s guide but with a gay twist.

It includes things such as the best gay bars and the best gay-friendly restaurants—the type that will put up a rainbow flag during pride month. Those are the types of places that LGBTQ travelers like to know about and support when they’re visiting.

TP: What sorts of things would you recommend for a gay visitor who is visiting Tampa?

SF: If you’re into clubbing or dancing, you’ve got to do Ybor City at night. During the day and night, Ybor is really different, so you have to do both. During the day, definitely do a tour of Ybor; if you’re into cigars, get a hand-rolled cigar, if you’re into Cuban coffee, that’s the best place to get it.

So many of our other attractions are great for gay travelers, too—the Florida Aquarium, Museum of Art—and everything is very walkable. The Riverwalk is the perfect thing because you get to hit all of it. You can hit some attractions, go to some great restaurants, our food hall, and get a little taste of everything.

If you have a car in town, definitely go to Busch Gardens, it’s a little bit north of everything else. It’s our biggest theme park and you can spend a whole day there.

TP: What’s coming on the calendar that queer travelers will be interested in?

SF: Pride in Tampa takes place in March and in St. Pete’s, it is in June, so it feels like we celebrate that for three whole months around here! We also have the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) International Business & Leadership Conference coming here in August 2019, so that’s really going to be an all-hands-on-deck event for the entire city to welcome them.

In 2020, we have some amazing hotels opening in the downtown area. We’ve got the Tampa Edition, which will be 137 rooms, that’s going to be very chic, very upscale, and I can see the LGBTQ community loving that—there’s a great bar and restaurant to come with the property, too.

We’re also getting our J.W. Marriott downtown, and that will be located right next to the Tampa Marriott Waterside. That’s going to have a great rooftop bar, right in the center of downtown.

Plus, every year we have the Gasparilla Pirate Festival. Tampa’s a pirate town. The mythology is that Jose Gaspar invaded the city; there was a peace treaty he made with the mayor stating that one day per year—usually the last Saturday of January—he can invade the town.

We get 300,000 people attending, all dressed up as pirates. They drink, they talk like pirates and they catch beads—it’s very similar to Mardi Gras, but it’s all pirate-inspired. There’s a huge parade, floats and pirate ships.

It kicks off a whole season of Gasparilla events, including a music festival, an arts festival, a distance classic road race—and that goes all the way through March.