ORLANDO, Fla. — Nearly 1,000 pages of itemized expenses and legal filings circulating among Orange County staff members are drawing concerns because of what they appear to reveal: how Visit Orlando is spending more than $100 million dollars in Tourism Development Tax (TDT) revenue it receives every year.
Car washes. Lunches. Makeup. Gifts. Some things that would naturally come with wining and dining groups around the world to get them to spend their money in Central Florida. Other things – like the car washes – that are leaving some of the staffers pouring over the printed out spread sheets scratching their heads.
Visit Orlando’s budget has been under the microscope for years as the county struggles to dole out the remaining TDT funds to major venues while yearning to spend the money on infrastructure projects that it’s currently barred from funding.
Commissioners are preparing to pepper leadership with questions about a recent audit of the organization on Tuesday – and the documents are only adding fuel to their fire.
In 2018, Visit Orlando received $61 million in TDT funds as the area drew 75 million tourists. In 2023, the funding rose to $107 million while the region only gained a few hundred thousand additional tourists.
Had the funding kept with inflation, Visit Orlando would’ve received approximately $75 million that year.
“Why are we spending so much tax dollars on things that aren’t really producing anything?” Commissioner Mayra Uribe, who has led the charge against Visit Orlando, wondered Thursday.
The document drawing the most interest was a one-page summary of the 2023 expenses generated by a third party. It listed how much New York-based advertisers received, salaries and incentives, and payments the person who crunched the numbers categorized as “wasteful,” “questionable” and “duplicative.”
Among the findings deemed wasteful was more than $900,000 in hotel incentives, $112,000 in gifts and employee gifts, $7,000 in cosmetics and hair care, $1,400 in car washes and a $250,000 payment to sponsor an episode of the Netflix show, Somebody Feed Phil.
Visit Orlando’s leaders immediately questioned the summary document, saying that the findings -- upon first glance -- did not match their internal numbers. They said they weren’t able to provide much additional comment on the findings without analyzing them and the supporting data.
“This particular document that that you shared with me, none of this was in the audit,” Visit Orlando President & CEO Casandra Matej said. “So it’s really hard because what we are going in front of the Board of County Commissioners [for] is the audit report, and so this particular report, none of these expenses were highlighted in that report.”
Matej talked about some of the concerns Uribe and others brought up. She said non-TDT revenues were down over the years in part because they stopped selling theme park tickets directly after finding it cost them more than the value of the tickets.
On the hotel incentives, she said they were needed to offset the cost for groups which would otherwise pick a cheaper destination to travel to. She also said the agency was taking a look at how it procured contracts with vendors based on the recommendations of the county’s audit.
She did, however, defend Visit Orlando’s decision to sponsor Phil’s visit to Central Florida, where he highlighted restaurants at the theme parks and in communities like the Milk District, Eatonville, Audubon Park and Parramore.
“It just talked about Orlando for one complete episode in 190 countries, in eight different languages,” she said. “It was very much part of our strategy to elevate the perception of our culinary arts, so we actually think it was a deal.”
On the macro level, she also defended Visit Orlando’s way of allocating its growing budget.
“All of our strategies… the baseline is research and what travel sentiment is,” she said. “Are people wanting to travel?”
In an unrelated press release Thursday sent before WFTV obtained the documents, Visit Orlando highlighted the $94.5 billion dollar impact the tourism industry had on the Orlando region, saying it offset each home’s tax bill by $7,400 and supported more than 460,000 jobs.
“What kind of jobs are they?” Uribe asked, mentioning many tourism workers can’t afford to live in Orange County. “I believe Visit Orlando owes the taxpayers their money… You don’t get a pass on tax dollars, and that’s the bottom line. Tax dollars have to be accounted for.”
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