Aug. 19–The cost to spend a night at a hotel in Palm Beach County grew by more than 8 percent in the second quarter of 2014 as a record number of tourists visited the state, tourism officials said Tuesday.

The average daily room rate in Palm Beach County was $145 from April to June, up from $134 for the same quarter last year, an increase of 8.4 percent.

Gov. Rick Scott announced Tuesday that 24 million tourists visited the state during the second quarter. That’s a 3 percent jump over the same time period a year ago.

Visit Florida, the state’s tourism marketing arm, estimates that the record number includes 2.8 million visitors from overseas and 1 million Canadians.

Scott has pushed to increase spending on Visit Florida advertising to try to boost the state’s tourism industry. This fiscal year the state set aside $74 million for the effort.

Last year nearly 95 million people visited the state. Scott aims to boost that number to 100 million even though legislators did not increase funding for Visit Florida as much as he wanted.

In Palm Beach County, the hotel occupancy rate for the second quarter was 70.2 percent, down slightly from last year’s level of 70.5 percent. The inventory of hotel rooms in the county increase by 0.7 percent, tourism officials said.

An important benchmark for hoteliers is revenue per available room, which gives an average of what visitors pay based on actual occupancy. In the second quarter, it was up by 8 percent in Palm Beach County, tourism officials said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.