TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami / NSF) – Florida’s tourism marketing agency plans international travel while officials work to offset the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the travel industry.

Visit Florida President and CEO Dana Young said Tuesday the agency was planning a trip to Mexico in June. A similar trip to England is planned in July or August, depending on the status of the border crossing requirements for the UK.

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“These trips are designed to further cement our existing relationships with our domestic trade and build on some new strategic relationships with airlines and other trading partnerships in these countries,” Young told members of the Executive Committee of the Visit Florida Board.

Additional details about the trips were not immediately available. Visit Florida recently reported that outbound travel fell 74.4 percent in the first quarter of 2021 compared to 2020, after falling 70.4 percent for all of 2020 from 2019.

“Overseas visitor numbers are low, but encouraging,” said Young. “And Florida clearly outperforms the rest of the United States among international travelers. Although many of the borders remain tight, some Latin American markets, particularly Colombia and Mexico, are increasingly visited. “

Young said one of the agency’s goals is to outperform a state economist’s forecast that Florida’s tourism sector won’t fully recover until 2024.

“Our goal is to beat that,” said Young. “And we believe that the numbers we start to see and the data we see and the trends we see could solidly put us on the right track to do so.”

Florida drew 26.162 million domestic and international visitors from January 1 to March 31, compared to 30.4 million tourists in the first quarter of 2020 when the Florida pandemic hit Florida when the theme parks closed and Major League Baseball the short one Spring training broke off.

The number of tourists declined to 9.92 million in the second quarter of 2020, a 69.4 percent year-over-year decline before rising to 20.33 million in the third quarter and 19.096 million in the fourth quarter.

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In January, Amy Baker, the legislature’s Bureau of Economic and Demographic Research Coordinator, suggested that while tourism numbers show expected improvements for the coming year, it may not be until 2024 before normalcy returns to the hospitality and leisure industries.

In revising the state’s tax revenue projections in March, Baker set the return for outbound travelers to “normal” in fiscal 2022-2023.

2020 tourism numbers were the lowest in a decade for a state heavily reliant on travelers to boost its economy.

When the state reopened last summer, Visit Florida was targeting regions on the east coast that are easy to drive to Florida, and this year marketing efforts expanded to California, Oregon, and Washington.

A spending plan of $ 50 million is due to be presented to the Visit Florida board of directors on June 8th.

The state budget approved by lawmakers on April 30th is $ 75 million for Visit Florida, including a one-time allocation of $ 25 million from government stimulus funds under the American Rescue Plan Act.

Young said America Rescue Plan money depends on the state receiving the money from the federal government.

Visit Florida can also spend $ 5 million from the US Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration. That money came from another stimulus package known as the CARES Act.

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