Word: tourists
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Hyperbolic drumbeaters still proclaim Miami Beach as "the sun and fun capital of the world" to big spenders from the North. The reality, as first-time visitors will speedily discover during the tourist season that opens this week, is startlingly different. The sun is still there (temperatures last week were in the 80s), but not the fun. So rapidly has the seven-mile-long island degenerated that it can be fairly described as a seedy backwater of debt-ridden hotels, gaudy condominiums and decaying apartments. It has a permanent population so old (median age: 68) that lifeguards spend more time...
...headliners" will be its own singing waiters. At least three other hotels are tangled in bankruptcy proceedings; vacant stores dot the island, and even the members of the world's oldest profession have drifted elsewhere to more prosperous locations. No new hotel has opened in a decade; tourist spending in that period has fallen a precipitous 43% by one estimate, and revenues of some establishments have dropped as much...
...True, tourist traffic may be higher this winter than during last year's disastrous season, if only because the weather probably will not be so bad again (temperatures dropped into the 30s last January). But convention business, which has become crucial to what prosperity the Beach has left, is likely to fall off by a fifth this year. The American College of Surgeons and several other large groups have vowed never to return until more first-class hotel rooms are available. At present, only 3,500 of Miami Beach's 27,000 hotel rooms rate that designation...
...scene for a quarter of a century: "Miami Beach reminds you of a New York subway." From a more scientific viewpoint, Frank Borman, the former astronaut who is now chairman of Eastern Air Lines, concluded from his company's research that "the Beach is dying as a tourist attraction." Eastern's figures reveal that as recently as 1971, more than four out of ten visitors arriving in Florida headed for the Miami area. Last year the figure was fewer than three out often...
...decline is the popularity of competing resorts. While the number of hotel rooms in Miami Beach fell by 3,000 during the past decade, Las Vegas added 15,000 and Hawaii, prospering on cheap air charters, increased its total by more than 27,000 rooms. Low-cost tourist packages ($319 for travel and lodging in London; only $355 for a return flight from New York to Casablanca) have drawn away the younger set, while retired sun seekers have been lured to Mexico, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The surprising boom of the Caribbean cruise business added to the damage; many...