Hello and welcome to the Diz Unplugged Roundtable discussion for January 30th, 2007, from Orlando, Florida on your host, Pete Werner.

And with us this week, as always, are Bob Varley, Julie Martin, Corey Martin, Kevin Close, and John Meijai.

And this week we're going to tell you about the most popular news stories on the Diz.

And we'll also talk about all the new announcements that Disney made during their press event last week, and you won't want to miss that.

And we're also going to tell you about one of the best kept secrets in Orlando velvet sessions, a very cool party that's held the last Thursday of every month at the Hard Rock Hotel at Universal.

So with that, let's get ahead and start with the news.

Our number three news story this week is from travel weekly reporting that the number of visitors to Florida in the third quarter of 2006 fell by more than 516,000 people compared with the same period the year before.

Sparking concerns at the state will see its first year over year decrease in tourism since the 9-11 attacks, which all but decimated the tourism industry here in 2002.

Now, according to visit Florida, which is the state's tourism marketing organization, some 20.7 million visitors came to Florida during the months of July, August and September last year.

And that's down a little over 2.5% from the year before.

They're citing concerns about hurricane season, which did not materialize thankfully last year.

Increased competition from other destinations and an underfunded marketing campaign are cited as the main reasons for this downturn.

Visit Florida takes, it's a percentage of all rental car taxes is put towards the state tourism marketing board visit Florida.

And they use that money to go and, you know, try and draw visitors in from other places.

But other destinations are much, much better funded, for example, Australia is spending somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million to promote in the UK.

To bring people there, whereas Florida only spent 1.5 million last year.

We just don't, the money's not there.

So they're saying that's part of it.

And Orlando did not get away on scale.

They're saying that occupancy rates in town last last year are expected to go down over 2005, even though the price of hotel rooms rose over 9%.

And for the first time, the average price of a room in Orlando is now over $100 a night.

So, you know, you can't keep racing the prices and wondering why people aren't showing up.

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