Numbers released early Monday by Visit Florida show the number of visitors to the state shot up to 97.3 million in 2014, a 3.9 percent increase over 2013.
Governor Rick Scott touted the good news at Tampa International Airport earlier.
"In 2010, the year before I got elected, there were 82 million tourists in our state," Scott said. "So we've gone up 15 million tourists."
So, Rick Scott becomes governor and, boom, mobs of tourists from Toledo to Tokyo flock to Florida at staggering rates.
Coincidence? Of course not.
They come for the sunshine and sugar-sand beaches; they stay for the gutted environmental regulations and privatized prisons.
But, hey, higher tourism numbers mean that more people are employed, so we've got that going. According to the News Service of Florida, some 1.1 million people in the state work in the hospitality industry out of 9.1 million people employed statewide. Visit Florida President and Chief Executive Officer Will Seccombe told legislators last week that approximately 12 percent of all state sales-tax revenue comes from people who don't live in Florida.
Most visitors are, of course, from the U.S., though Florida attracted an estimated 11.5 million overseas visitors. About 3.8 million of our polite neighbors to the north (or, "Canadians") paid a visit here.
Tampa Bay is also seeing its own tourism numbers grow year over year as more and more visitors recognize that there are about 900 different places where you can feed a giraffe (or lemur, or otter, or rhino, or kangaroo).
Pinellas County, for example, pulled in a record $35 million in bed tax (the nickel-on-the-dollar hotels charge) revenue in 2014; Hillsborough nabbed about $23 million, also a record high, according to the counties' respective convention and visitors' bureaus.
On Monday Scott touted the statewide numbers as a reason to boost the state's tourism promotion budget from $74 million to $85 million, according to the News Service of Florida, in order to reach his 2015 goal of 100 million tourists. That proposal is seeing resistance from the likes of State Senator Jack Latvala, who chairs the Senate Transportation, Tourism and Economic Development Appropriations committee.
"To me, potentially, we're getting to a situation where maybe we've spent or are spending what we need," Latvala said during last week's meeting of his panel, according to NSF.
This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2015.
