According to the state's tourism marketing organization, tourism activity in Florida was impressively strong in the first quarter of 2005.

" From January through March 2005, Florida hosted 23.8 million visitors, an increase of 11.5 percent over the same period last year, or an increase of 2.5 million visitors."

Visit Florida says it tallied the visitor numbers from primary data at Florida's 14 major airports, which results in an estimate of visitors to the state by air. In addition, in order to estimate non-air visitation, Visit Florida subscribes to the Travel Industry Association's TravelScope data, which is used to develop the relative percentages of air and non-air visitors.