Florida Aquarium upgrading penguin exhibit

A brutally cold winter and a very hot summer have been especially good to The Florida Aquarium.

And following right along, aquarium officials hinted they will add a few more features to their current expansion plans, including a new penguin exhibit, potentially with large pools where visitors could watch penguins playing and swimming.

Penguins have been especially popular ever since the aquarium brought several to walk among visitors. That idea of parading penguins through the facility originally came from the Peabody hotel in Orlando, which has ducks walk through the lobby.

Now aquarium visitors are asking for a larger exhibit to watch penguins jump and play together in the water, aquarium President Thom Stork told a conference of hotel owners and operators at Tampa International Airport Thursday.

Along with the penguin project, the aquarium could build a much bigger ballroom to handle more corporate parties, weddings and special holiday parties - likely on the waterfront with a good view of Harbour Island, Stork said.

There will also be a coral exhibit and several more classrooms to help the aquarium with more educational projects with schools and other teaching groups.

"It was a cold winter, and it's been a very hot summer," Stork said. "Guess what, we're air conditioned." That has helped the aquarium set record attendance figures, about 20 percent above last year.

Stork said the plans are preliminary, and he was not prepared to offer many details, but greater attendance has helped encourage such plans, as well as potential donors.

At not-for-profits like the aquarium, such projects can take much longer than their corporate entertainment counterparts, Stork noted. So he's planning a long-term fundraising drive and hopes to have some of these exhibits open in the next three to four years.

Along those lines, travel economists told the audience that average room rates in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area now stand at $97.96 per night, down about 11 percent. Several points of that decline are due to the Super Bowl last year, which helped keep rates artificially high. Meanwhile, occupancy now stands at about 60 percent, down about 5 percent.

Officials with the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention & Visitors Bureau said they are aggressively fighting misperceptions about the BP oil spill, and are heavily advertising in U.S. markets that there is no oil on Pinellas County beaches.