To waterfront restaurant manager Arty Cholminski, there is no question that red tide was the culprit when business choked in August and September.

"We were actually doing very well," Cholminski said. "Then the red tide rolled in, and it just dropped off. It just dropped off."

For people like the Anna Maria Island restaurateur, red tide's effect on their livelihood always has been a given. But just how much does red tide affect business?

No one had anything close to a precise answer until a pair of University of Florida researchers zeroed in on five years' worth of sales tax data from Fort Walton Beach and Destin.

Hotels and restaurants in those two Panhandle hot spots lost an average 32.3 percent of their revenue in months when red tide was stinking up the coast.

The study by economists Sherry Larkin and Charles Adams, to be published in the journal Society and Natural Resources, is the first in Florida to isolate red tide as a source of business losses.

While it is not surprising to find that red tide affects waterfront hotels and restaurants, pulling hard numbers from circumstantial muck might help propel citizens or governments to act.

"Costly efforts at improving monitoring and prediction of red tide events might be better justified with this information," Larkin and Adams concluded.

The study also is the first in Florida to use an empirical approach, rather than interviews and other anecdotal information, Adams said.

The two economists looked at taxable sales data for a five-year period, 1995 through 1999. They used statistical models to isolate different variables, including tropical storms and hurricanes, rainfall and growth of the restaurant and lodging sectors over time.

Fort Walton Beach and Destin saw three hurricanes or tropical storms and four red tide events in that time.

Restaurants and hotels lost more money in months with red tide than tropical storms or hurricanes. The researchers hypothesize that is because the storms lasted a shorter time. In the case of hotels, reservations could be canceled but not without financial penalty.

The economists did not try to distinguish between low and high red tide levels. They simply asked, "Was red tide present?"

In doing so, they acknowledged that media reports of red tide's presence has a chilling effect, though symptom-inducing conditions change on a daily basis.

Red tide chill

The chill hit Southwest Florida late this summer.

A large red tide bloom has lingered in the Gulf of Mexico since late July and worked its way north from Lee County.

The red tide algae, karenia brevis, are still present, but beachgoing conditions can be favorable.

"The business goes down when red tide is here, no matter what," said Andrew Dropla, captain of Venice's Adventure Parasail.

Recreational fishing is likewise taking a hit.

Captains have to travel farther offshore to find fish, an effort that almost drove Capt. Bunny Davids into retirement.

Operating out of Englewood, Davids grew tired of spending more than $200 a trip to carry his customers 20 to 30 miles out to sea.

He used to be able to catch plenty of fish near the shore on a regular basis, but last year's long red tide bloom took a toll on the fish population.

Even with the longer trips this year, Davids found it difficult to find enough fish for his clients.

"If they don't catch any fish I feel worse than they do, and I got tired of feeling bad," Davids said. "I might as well have a gun and rob the people."

Florida residents were canceling their weekend stays in August and September, said Amanda Edge, a co-owner of ESP Properties on Anna Maria.

"If we have red tide and people want to reschedule, we let them. We don't penalize them. We'd rather they come back and try us when we didn't have it than not come back."

Edge is among the business owners who worry about the long-term effect of red tide on visitors' impressions.

The 10-month outbreak of 2005 was worrisome because it persisted through the peak tourist season.

The Sarasota Convention & Visitors Bureau found last year that visitor satisfaction dropped 10 points in a first-quarter survey.

That was a significant drop, considering those quarterly surveys tend to place visitor satisfaction near 99 percent, bureau President Virginia Haley said.

Lee County, where red tide cropped up this summer, has seen similar feedback.

"They always like the beaches best. When there's poor water quality, that's what they mention that they like the least," said Tamara Pigott, deputy director and red tide point person for the Lee County Visitor & Convention Bureau.

The fear of long-term impacts goes hand-in-hand with the loathing of media attention.

"If the national media gets a hold of it, they may think the entire state is affected by it," said Katherine Moulton, president of The Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key.

The Colony has not seen any significant loss from red tide this summer, but hotel occupancies are down all along the state's West Coast, said Moulton, who is very active in the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association.

The consensus in the trade group is that the cumulative effect of hurricanes, and possibly the 2005 red tide, kept people away in late summer.

Moulton emphasized that she thinks hurricanes, which receive attention worldwide, have a more lasting impact.

Haley has a feeling that August will turn out to have been a "bad" month, but she doesn't know how much red tide had to do with it.

Is it the cumulative effect of hurricanes? Haley also is hearing that business from the United Kingdom, a staple of the summer season, was down.

Hard to gauge

Red tide often becomes mixed up with other events that affect business.

Mike Pachota, co-owner of the Venice beachfront restaurant Sharky's on the Pier, pointed out that red tide was around last summer, too. Yet last summer's sales would be tough to beat.

"The red tide right now is not nearly as bad as it's been in the past," he said.

Pachota thinks this summer was slower because of high gas prices and a deflating real estate market.

"There's not as much action as there was last year."

Adams, the UF researcher, wanted to study red tide's effect on business in Sarasota and Manatee counties, but the data washed out because businesses were strung along more than 35 miles of coastline.

Instead, he and Larkin focused on the two Panhandle cities because the restaurants and hotels are clustered densely in two ZIP codes.

Adams cautioned that money lost at restaurants and hotels doesn't mean the entire local economy suffered.

"If (customers) couldn't go to the beach, they did something else. It may be a minimal change for the overall economy."

Adams, who works on marine economics for the Florida Sea Grant Extension program, said the restaurant and hotel study is just one of several that revolve around red tide.

The team also conducted a 1,000-household survey in Sarasota and Manatee counties to gauge public perceptions.

Early results, such as the number of people who think it's not OK to eat crabmeat during an outbreak, show more education is needed, he said.

Adams also wants to see how red tide affects water-based recreation.

He's asking: Do people cancel their activities? Delay them? Or go somewhere else?

"That last option is important because it means they took their money elsewhere."

originally Published October 09. 2006