Heartlessly steal from the South's holiday hotspot (6)

I believe the answer is:
resort
'hotspot' is the definition.
Both the definition and answer are singular nouns.
Maybe you can see a link between them that I can't see?
'heartlessly steal from the south's holiday' is the wordplay.
'heartlessly' means to remove the middle letters.
'steal' becomes 'rifle' (I've seen this before).
'from' means one lot of letters go next to another.
'the south's holiday' becomes 'sort' (I can't justify this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'rifle' with its middle removed is 're'.
're'+'sort'='RESORT'
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for resort that I've seen before include "Put fresh order" , "About to arrange" , "Nice for one" , "Place for holidays" , "haunt" .)