Leading Question

>>Yes, but slowly, say tourism officials.

"Not being in the news all summer long was really nice," says Mark Crabb, deputy director of the Lee County Visitor and Convention Bureau. "I think it's still going to be steady growth. I don't see it [being] huge."

Meeting planners are booking not only for this year, but also for 2008. "The planners are going, 'OK, maybe [the series of storms] was a fluke,'" he says.

With planners willing to give Southwest Florida a chance again, Crabb says he would love to see a 5 percent increase in this year's meeting business. Meetings comprise about 26 to 30 percent of Lee's tourism industry, up from 10 to 12 percent just five years ago.

In Collier County, tourism officials are expecting a slight rise in the number of meeting attendees as well as spending because of increased hotel rates, says Jack Wert, executive director of the Greater Naples, Marco Island, Everglades Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Collier specializes in small- and medium-sized corporate and association meetings and conferences. Advance bookings for group meetings are exceeding plans for most of the county's resort hotels for the first quarter of 2007, Wert says.

"The lack of storms this year should bode well for us in the coming year," Wert says, adding that meeting planners still will be a little cautious.

Collier officials also expect some of the meeting business it captured from the closing of South Seas Island Resort on Captiva Island, for $140 million in refurbishments after Hurricane Charley, to return to the facility when it reopens for meetings this year.

Crabb says most of the meetings in Lee will continue to be concentrated in the county's three major properties-Sanibel Harbour Resort & Spa, Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort & Spa and South Seas. But he is seeing that more smaller meetings-with 300 attendees or less-also are being booked, taking advantage of other properties, such as the Embassy Suites and Crown Plaza at the Bell Tower Shops (formerly the Holiday Inn Select).

Both counties use a variety of tactics to sell the area to meeting planners. That includes attending trade shows and advertising in trade publications as well as hosting "familiarization trips" for planners and journalists to visit local hotels, venues and attractions.

Those trips, which could have from a couple to a dozen or more planners, help combat a negative reputation that might be circulating from those who witnessed the hurricanes' devastation in 2004 and 2005.

"They're getting second-hand information from a lot of people who were here two years ago, saying, 'I wouldn't go back after that,'" Crabb says. "We've done a lot of work around here. We're ready for more meetings."

-Lori Johnston