Drew Dixon
Florida was the top vacation destination among Americans — again — and Gov. Ron DeSantis is spotlighting the record-breaking performance.
The Sunshine State accounted for 15.5% of domestic tourism in America in 2024. That’s up by nearly 1 percentage point from 2023. It’s also the sixth time the state has broken its own tourism record during the DeSantis administration.
“Florida is the world’s favorite place to visit,” DeSantis said. “This record tourism is a result of policies that prioritize freedom, public safety, and common sense.”
That 2024 trend seems to be carrying over into 2025 thus far. The number of Canadians visiting Florida by air has increased by 0.5% in the first two months. That’s also above the national figure, which showed a 2.3% decline of Canadians traveling to the United States.
The number of overseas travelers coming to Florida also jumped in January and February, with a 6.5% increase compared to the same time last year. Much of those gains were attributed to increases in visitors from the United Kingdom, Brazil and Argentina.
An announcement from February also highlighted that Florida is a top destination for travelers worldwide. There were 142.9 million people who came to Florida last year. That’s an increase of 1.6% over the 2023 figure.
The 2024 travel season also finished on a strong note. The fourth quarter of last year drew 33.1 million visitors. That was the biggest draw of travelers coming to the Sunshine State ever recorded in the fourth quarter.
Domestic travelers accounted for most of those visitors, with 29.9 million domestic visits to the state. Another 2.5 million people came from overseas during the last three months of 2024, plus another 742,000 who came from Canada.
