Airbnb Marketing
in Florida

Florida's visitor economy is older than the state itself. St. Augustine — founded in 1565, the oldest continuously-occupied European settlement in the continental United States — has hosted travelers for more than 460 years, nearly three centuries before Florida became a state in 1845. But the modern template was set by one man's railroad. Henry Flagler ran his Florida East Coast Railway down the Atlantic shore, opening grand hotels as he went — the Hotel Ponce de León in St. Augustine in 1888, the Royal Poinciana at Palm Beach, and the line into Miami in 1896 — premium destinations connected by rail and supported, from the very start, by state-level marketing.

He did not build it alone, and he did not build it unprompted. Julia Tuttle — remembered as the "Mother of Miami" — owned the land at the mouth of the Miami River and persuaded Flagler to bring his railway south, platting the city his trains created. On the sandbar across Biscayne Bay, Carl Fisher dredged Miami Beach into existence in the 1910s and then did the thing Florida has always done best: he marketed it, relentlessly, to the entire country — billboards, publicity stunts, and the Flamingo Hotel in 1921. On the Gulf coast, Henry Plant's railroad and his 1891 Tampa Bay Hotel did the same work in mirror image. By the mid-1920s the land boom had the whole nation buying Florida lots off painted beachfront signs.

The twentieth century layered destination on destination. Miami Beach's Art Deco district was renewed through the 1980s and '90s; the Space Coast launched a nation's imagination; the Panhandle's emerald coast — 30A, Destin, Panama City Beach — grew into a sugar-sand vacation market of its own; and Naples and Sarasota built a Gulf-coast retirement-and-second-home economy. Above all, Walt Disney World opened near Orlando in 1971 and made central Florida the theme-park capital of the world. Today Florida hosts more visitors a year than all but a handful of entire countries — a genuinely global visitor economy.

The platform-era short-term-rental market that grew on top of all this is the largest in the United States by listing count, and every sub-market — Miami, Orlando, the Keys, the Panhandle, Naples, Sarasota, Tampa, the Space Coast — runs on its own distinct dynamics. Its single most important structural feature is legal: Florida's 2011 law (SB 872) bars local governments from banning short-term rentals outright, though they can still regulate through zoning, taxation and life-safety codes. That state-level protection is why Florida has stayed the country's most STR-friendly market — and why the gap between an average listing and a well-marketed one is worth more here than almost anywhere else. That gap is the chapter Cavmir writes.