MIAMI -- After Sept. 11, Dezer Hotels saw a four-year streak of double-digit growth vanish along with international tourists and Americans' appetite for taking to the skies.

The South Florida hotel chain's occupancy rate, which measures how close a hotel comes to filling its rooms, dropped by 50 percent for three months following the terrorist attacks. Dezer slashed room rates by about 10 percent at its five oceanfront resorts and focused its advertising on locals and out-of-state tourists inclined to drive to their vacation destinations.

Despite the efforts, occupancy is still down about 10 percent, said Joey Eisner, the chain's general manager.

"You are trying to do the utmost not to go backward," Eisner said. "Thank God people are coming with cars."

Florida's tourism industry was already hurting from the sluggish U.S. economy when the attacks slowed air travel and dried up bookings at hotels, theme parks and cruise lines.

A year later, there are signs of a gradual if uneven recovery, one that is still threatened by economic problems in South America, lingering frustration over airport delays and worries over the health of the U.S. economy.

19 percent drop

Tom Flanagan, spokesman for Visit Florida, the state's tourism promotion agency, said the total number of visitors from outside the state dropped by about 19 percent in the last three months of 2001. An estimate of the first quarter 2002 figures shows a 4.5 percent drop.

"That was a strong bounceback," he said. "It will really be necessary to see what's going on when we get the second quarter numbers."

A look at statewide occupancy rates, county "bed tax" collections and airport traffic data shows how the outlook for recovery varies among different parts of the state.

Panhandle cities that have traditionally drawn tourists from nearby southern states who drive to their destinations have seen their tourist numbers rise, Flanagan said.

"We are, honestly, doing very well," said Darrel Jones, head of the Tourist Development Council of Okaloosa County. "We have a lot of visitors from throughout Florida and local southeast states, so Sept. 11 didn't affect us in the same way."

Tourist bed tax collections dropped about 6 percent in the three months after the attacks, but have since gone up 2.15 percent, Jones said.

"It hit us going into our fall season, which is not a peak season for us," he said. "We've been marketing heavily in the lower-tier states, Ohio, Indiana. We saw a great influx of those folks, and our Canadian folks still came down."

Hotels in the area are 72 percent to 97 percent booked for July, he said.

Central part of state

Central Florida's hotels and theme parks have also been getting their share of the tourist drive market, but a dip in the number of international and domestic tourists flying into Orlando may be to blame for a persistent decline in resort taxes collected by Orange County since Sept. 11.

From Sept. 1, 2001 through June, the bed tax collections for the county were off 15.3 percent compared with the same period in 2001. Collections for June were roughly 6 percent down from the previous year.

Following the attacks, attendance at Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando declined. The companies laid off hundreds of workers, reduced the hours of thousands of employees and temporarily closed some restaurants and hotel rooms.

But by April, theme parks' confidence in summer crowds led them to hire thousands of part-time and seasonal workers. As of July, occupancy rates at Walt Disney World were back to 90 percent of normal levels, according to a report by Prudential Financial.

South Florida has fared the worst because so much of its tourist traffic is made up of domestic air travelers and tourists from Europe and South America.

More than half of overnight visitors to Miami-Dade County travel by air, and more than half of those are international travelers, said J. Antonio Villamil, chairman of Gov. Jeb Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

The number of international passengers flying into Miami International Airport between January and June was down 12.4 percent. Domestic passenger arrivals were down slightly less, 10.5 percent.

According to Smith Travel, hotel occupancy rates in Miami-Dade County hotels have been down every week since Sept. 22 and as recently as Aug. 10.

"We have not recovered from a year ago. It's that simple," said William Anderson, a director for the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau.

South America issue

Villamil said South Florida has recovered from the economic impact of the attacks, but blames the current tourism slump on the state of South American economies.

"You have basically an economic depression in Argentina and economic recessions in the rest of the countries, like Brazil, and almost 30 percent devaluation on the exchange rate," Villamil said.

Airport delays stemming from the government's efforts to bolster security and restrictions on how long foreign tourists can visit the United States are also a factor, Villamil said.

"What we hear is that the international arrivals don't feel that welcome, they're having problems getting extensions of their stay and so forth."

Villamil said he doesn't see South American economies recovering until 2004 at the earliest, and doesn't see any significant improvement in the number of middle-class South American tourists coming to Florida before 2003.

What has improved is the cruise industry, whose two top companies call South Florida home.

The economic fallout of the attacks put two cruise lines -- American Classic Voyages and Renaissance Cruises -- into bankruptcy and left others with cancellations and lower bookings.

A year later, the big cruise lines are filling ships, just not as quickly as in the past, analysts say. Pricing levels are also not quite back to where they were before the attacks.