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Want To Know A Hotel's Secrets? Check New Database

Tribune file photo by JAY CONNER (2007)

The database contains Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation records on all Florida hotels.

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JEFF SCULLIN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 21, 2008

TAMPA - Travelers looking for a place to stay — including the thousands heading to Tampa soon for the Feb. 1 Super Bowl — often seek recommendations from friends, consult a guidebook or check online for customer reviews.

If you really want to know a hotel's secrets, though, ask a state inspector.

By law, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation is charged with inspecting the state's hotels twice a year. The department struggles to keep up with that requirement, though, and just 75 percent were checked out in fiscal year 2007.

If you're coming to Tampa for the Super Bowl, or planning a weekend getaway anywhere in Florida, you can look up the inspection record of any lodging in Florida at TBO.com's Data Bay. Just click the link on this page.

Some of the violations that turn up are deemed critical — locked emergency exits, missing smoke detectors, faulty sprinkler systems. Others are less serious — problems with housekeeping, plumbing or trash collection, for example.

The inspections are conducted to protect the public, but they're most closely followed by hotel operators, who use them to address specific problems or tweak their operations. Critical violations need to be handled within 30 days — or sooner, if an inspector decides. Most places, especially bigger chains and resorts, deal with violations immediately.

"Those are things that have an immediate impact on the health or safety of their guests, and those things, obviously, you cannot wait to deal with," said Gary Smith, director of membership for the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association.

"They all take them seriously," he said. "One person having a bad experience and passing it along can multiply many times online."

Smith was referring to customer reviews at online sites including TripAdvisor, Hotels.com and Expedia. They have grown so important to the industry that some managers respond to every negative post, according to an April article titled "How to manage negative online hotel reviews" at Hotelmarketing.com.

Spring is Tampa Bay's busiest tourist season, but the quality of its hotel rooms will be in the national spotlight in January once NFL fans start arriving for Super Bowl XLIII.

The league reserved about 20,000 rooms for officials, guests, the media and participating teams. The breakdown by region: Hillsborough County, 7,800 of its 21,500 hotel rooms; Pinellas, 3,600 of its 30,500 rooms; and the Orlando area, 8,700 out of more than 100,000 rooms.

That leaves plenty of rooms for fans, many of whom won't know they're coming until the winning teams emerge from the playoffs two weeks before the Super Bowl.

In the past, 35,000 to 45,000 visitors made plans for the Super Bowl in Tampa with about two weeks notice, Super Bowl officials have said.

Jeff Scullin can be reached at (813) 779-4614.

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