Visit Florida President and CEO Bryan Griffin this week highlighted his staff's work for keeping tourism close to record numbers as travelers have been “tightening their belts.”
A recent report from the agency showed tourism was down 1.4% over the first half of the year compared to the same point in 2025, when the state handled about 74.5 million of its record 143.3 million visitors.
Griffin said the state tourism efforts are “holding steady” as many people who visited Florida in the first half of the decade — when the state capitalized on its reopening ahead of other states coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic — are now seeking new destinations and cutting costs.
“That is why it is more imperative than ever that we execute effective tourism marketing to keep our state top of mind for travelers,” Griffin said during the Visit Florida Board of Directors meeting Wednesday in West Palm Beach. “Domestically, travelers are tightening their belts because of higher costs, and consumers are more cautious with their budgets and their expenditures. These are real pressures.”
The meeting was timed with the ongoing Governor’s Conference on Tourism at the Palm Beach County Convention Center.
Domestic travelers, who accounted for nearly 92% of the overall tourism count this year, remain the focus of the agency, which put out an “extensive” marketing plan in May that included a focus on rural communities.
“That plan was written for this environment. We moved from standalone seasonal campaigns with gaps — we had the winter impulse campaign, families, outdoors and nature — to now a connected, always-on system,” Griffin said. “That is our biggest structural update; it is a continuous brand foundation so that Florida stays visible year-round.”
Griffin added that the year-around approach is needed as “travelers are pickier and booking later.”
An estimated 34.01 million second-quarter visitors brought the number of tourists over the first half of the year to 73.5 million.
The report showed domestic, overseas and Canadian travel into the state were all slightly down in the April through June period from the same period a year earlier. The overall domestic and Canadian numbers for the first half of the year were also lower than in the same period of 2025.
Griffin said they haven’t given up on drawing Canadians.
“Our international strategy is targeted towards incremental growth, not scattered,” Griffin said. “We have sustained and optimized our core markets like Canada and the U.K. In fact, we never pulled out of Canada. Even though overall paying travel to the U.S. has declined, Florida’s share of Canadian travel to the U.S. grew by 3 (percentage) points last year.”
Travelers from Canada into Florida dropped nearly 7% in 2025 from 2024, and over the first half this year the 1.68 million Canadian travelers into Florida was 13.9% lower than the same time in 2025.
But Florida hasn’t been alone in struggling for the past year with Canadian numbers amid a lingering chill involving trade, tariffs and rhetoric out of the Trump Administration.
A July 22 report from Statistics Canada stated that return border crossings from the U.S. in early 2026 were at levels similar to the end of 2025, “signaling a persistent shift away from the United States by Canadian residents in their travel preferences.”