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Super Bowl Fans Can Check Hotels Online

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By JEFF SCULLIN

jscullin@tampatrib.com

Published: November 25, 2008

TAMPA - Travelers looking for a place to stay, including the thousands heading to Tampa soon for the Super Bowl on Feb. 1, often seek input 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.

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

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.

"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 such as TripAdvisor, Hotels.com and Expedia. They have grown so important to the industry that some managers respond to every negative post, according to an article in April titled "How to manage negative online hotel reviews" at Hotelmarketing.com.

The quality of the Bay area's hotel rooms will be in the national spotlight in January once the NFL starts 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 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.

Editor Jeff Scullin can be reached at (813) 779-4614. Keyword: Hotel Inspections, to search lodgings in the Tampa Bay area and statewide.

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