Charm City residents feel lure of Sarasota

SARASOTA — The Baltimore/Washington, D.C. metro area is now the largest feeder market for the Sarasota tourism industry, surpassing a rank held by New York City for several years.

Nearly 26,000 visitors from the Mid-Atlantic region came to Sarasota County from January through March, according to a Visit Sarasota County report. That's up 128% over the same three months in 2014, when around 11,000 Mid-Atlantic residents visited Sarasota.

Visit Sarasota County officials attribute the increase to a marketing partnership between Visit Sarasota County and the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, which holds spring training in Sarasota.

“The sustained investment from our partnership with the Baltimore Orioles has really paid off,” VSC President Virginia Haley says in a statement. “This performance in the Mid-Atlantic region shows the benefits of the Orioles providing more than $1 million dollars of advertising and promotion annually in the DC/Baltimore area each of the last six years. It is great to see it be this successful.”

The year-round partnership is the only one of its kind in Major League Baseball, say Visit Sarasota officials. The partnership includes TV and radio broadcasts of some spring training games in the Mid-Atlantic region; Visit Sarasota advertising featured prominently in all Orioles publications; a Visit Sarasota Visitor Information Center at Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota; complimentary spring training tickets for Orioles Season Plan Members; and a Visit Sarasota County Day at Oriole Park.

“Our goal has always been to bring visitors from the Mid-Atlantic region to the greater Sarasota area,” Orioles Vice President of Communications and Marketing Greg Bader says in the statement, “but we never imagined they would so quickly constitute the largest number of visitors to the region during the winter months.”