1614-11 Various Miami Beach /- .
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THE MIAMI HERALD
Copyright (c) 1987, The Miami Herald
DATE: Thursday, September 10, 1987 EDITION: FINAL
SECTION: NEIGHBORS MB PAGE: 3 LENGTH: 51 lines
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: STEPHEN SMITH Herald Staff Writer
SUMMER IS HOT FOR MANY BEACH HOTELS
A tourism quiz, true or false: When summer arrives in Miami Beach, the
tourists don't, leaving hotels with dust, rental cars with rust and a city
gone bust.
False. Or, in the favorite languages of Beach hotel owners and rental car
managers, falsch, faux and falso.
Tourists from West Germany and France and Latin America visited in the
summer season just ended Monday, filling rooms, renting cars and helping fuel
a 16.3 percent increase in resort tax collections through July.
To speak of one season, from Thanksgiving to Easter, is wrong, said the
people who rent out the hotel rooms and the cars on the Beach. Their season is
now 12 months.
That means jobs year-round for the hotel help and a bonanza in resort
taxes -- not to mention the ever-important smiling hotel manager.
"There is no place else in the world where you can get a resort hotel
room for $26, $28, $30 a night," said Mark Gardner, manager of the Sagamore
Hotel, 1671 Collins Ave., where the charge averages $32 a night during the
summer.
"For $32 a night, you can't go wrong. You throw four people in a room, it
comes to $8 a night. How can you go wrong for $8 a night?"
Gardner t this answer to that question: During July, an
average of67;
ercent of the Sagamore's 129 rooms were'taJen. In August, about
88 percent d guests. The Sagamore's trade came mainly from Latin
America. So, too, at Doral-on-the-Ocean, especially during July, when 87
percent of the rooms were occupied. That is about the same rate as during the
winter season. The language there was Portuguese, as in Brazil.
"Basically, during the whole month of July, they took over the Doral, "
said Jeff Abbaticchio, public relations director of Dorals of Florida. In
July, about $247,900 in resort tax money was collected in Miami Beach. That
came from hotels and restaurants and other entertainment outposts. Same month,
year before, about $216,200 was collected. That amounts to a 14.7 percent
increase from July 1986 to July '87.
It wasn't a robust summer for everyone.
Gerry Sanchez said his three Ocean Drive hotels, the Waldorf Towers,
Edison and Breakwater, had a flat summer, about 43 percent full. Because all
three are recently renovated inns, he said, they don't benefit from the years
of marketing enjoyed by established hotels such as the Fontainebleau Hilton,
\\ which showed a 15 percent increase in room rentals over summer '86.
Forget the summer, Sanchez said. He said he'd just signed a contract with
French and English travel operators booking 100 of his rooms every day for a
year starting Nov. 1.
"We're going to be kicking people out of the rooms," Sanchez said. "Only
if they know me will they be able to get a room."
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