Florida tourism is down, but you wouldn’t know if you looked at Franklin County.

The state tourism marketing agency Visit Florida published preliminary figures for the fourth quarter and for the full year earlier this month. What it showed was that COVID-19 ended a decade of record-breaking Florida tourism numbers, with the industry seeing a 34 percent drop in visitor numbers in 2020 year over year.

The data showed that 86.714 million visitors came to the state in 2020, the lowest annual total since 2010.

However, due to Franklin County’s two-cent lodging tax levies, the picture here is very different.

In the first two months of the 2020-21 fiscal year, October and November, the county is more than 58 percent ahead of the 2019 numbers, with record or near record levels in each of those months.

Figures shared with the County Commission by Tourist Development Council director John Solomon show that the county’s lodging businesses raised approximately $ 147,500 in lodging taxpayers’ money in October, nearly $ 60,000 more than last year.

That was a nearly 64.6 percent year-over-year increase and the first time since the tax began in 2005 that it grossed over $ 100,000 in October.

In November, excluding the Florida Florida Food Festival, the property tax grossed nearly $ 86,500, up more than 51.5 percent year over year. This monthly total was only in second place after November 2018.

The first two months of the financial year showed that the district was doing better than 58 percent of the previous year on the calendar at this point.

Solomon has said a targeted advertising campaign that emphasizes the county’s openness contributed to the increase.

Dana Young, President and CEO of Visit Florida, said an estimated 20.625 million travelers to the state in the fourth quarter “exceeded our expectations,” but if the numbers are refined, the number of visitors for the year may be reduced. In particular, Visit Florida believes that an estimated 3.236 million overseas visitors, calculated by the State Revenue Estimating Conference for 2020, is about 400,000 too high.

Before the pandemic, the state estimated that 1.6 million jobs were supported by tourism. The US Travel Association reported that four out of ten jobs lost nationwide last year were in the leisure and hospitality industries.

According to Visit Florida figures, the state attracted an estimated 20.62 million visitors in the fourth quarter of 2020, a 33.1 percent decrease from the previous year. The pandemic had cut tourism by 60.3 percent in the second quarter of 2020 and by 32.7 percent in the third quarter.

The 82.19 million travelers from other parts of the country for 2020 were a 29.7 percent decrease from 2019. The 1.286 million Canadian visitors in 2020 were a 64.5 percent decrease year over year.