- March 27, 2024
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Everyone knows tourism in Florida spikes in the winter and slows in the summer.
That's why it's hard to draw meaningful conclusions from the tourist-tax data from one month to the next. For example, there's a good chance May's tax collections will be lower than April's because the shoulder month after Easter is typically slower.
To provide more meaningful data to the tourism industry, Florida Gulf Coast University's Gary Jackson recently started providing seasonally adjusted tourist-tax data for Charlotte, Collier and Lee counties as part of a monthly economic report he publishes as the director of the Regional Economic Research Institute at FGCU.
“When you look from month to month, you can't tell whether it's seasonal or a trend,” Jackson explains of the seasonal spikes. “We go over the last three years and verify that pattern and take it out of the data. Then we get what is the trend.”
As you might imagine, the trend lately has been very good indeed.
For January 2014, total seasonally adjusted tourism-tax revenues rose 20% to $4.7 million compared with January 2013. Collier County led the way with 24% growth, followed by Lee's 18% growth and Charlotte's 11% increase.