tourism

Updated June 26: 

At its June 20 meeting, the Key West City Commission voted 5-2 to approve an agreement with Phil Peterson's Key West Poker Run that provides for the city to close off part of Duval Street and the organization to pay for police and fire services during the event.

Every year, an estimated 10,000 motorcycles rumble down the Overseas Highway from Miami to Key West during the third weekend of September in the annual Phil Peterson's Poker Run.

President Donald Trump's first executive order restricting travel to the US by citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations caused chaos at US airports and was eventually suspended by the courts.

Uncertainty about the president’s newest, narrower executive order barring nationals from six Muslim-majority countries is already creating more confusion about who can and who can't travel to the US.

A Miami-based rapper. A second-tier English soccer club and a sports car racing team.

What ties them together is Visit Florida, the state group that markets Florida to tourists across the country and across the globe. What also ties these three together is they provided the ammunition for opponents of using taxpayer money to promote tourism.

While tourism industry groups from around the country are warning of a drop in international visitors because of President Donald Trump's immigration policies and rhetoric, the head of the Keys tourism agency said he's hearing of a different cause.

Governor Rick Scott is touring Florida to go to bat for two agencies the state legislature is trying to do away with - Enterprise Florida, the state’s public-private economic development agency, and Visit Florida, the state's tourism-marketing arm.

At a roundtable meeting in Sunrise, Wednesday, Scott talked to a room full of local business leaders about the importance of hanging on to both.

“Your tourist economy was worth $8 billion dollars last year, just in Broward County. In this county, 113,000 jobs are tied to tourism,” Scott said.

With record tourism comes big business, but you won’t find a front desk at one of the largest lodging groups in the state - Airbnb.

The home-sharing network has almost 33,000 hosts in Florida, generating millions of dollars for it and the hosts, basically property owners who rent a room, home or a condo for a few days to a visitor. The company calls it a short-term rental and insists it is not in competition with the hotel business.

The traditional hotel business is growing in South Florida. Here's what 2016 looked like for hotels in Miami-Dade and Broward counties: