MIAMI—During the September 2015 HVS South Florida Hotel Market Connections (SFHMC) event, one message stood out loud and clear: just when we thought South Florida couldn't get any hotter, it is. Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach hotels are all celebrating record-breaking years in ADR, occupancy and RevPar. At least that's how Kathy Conrow, managing director of HVS in Florida, tells it.

"Foreign hotel investors, as well as brokers who attended the SFHMC were intrigued by the astonishingly robust data: annual occupancy for Miami-Dade and Broward counties in 2014 was just shy of 80%, which was 20% higher than the average for the US," Conrow tells Globest.com. "Hotel occupancy for Palm Beach County ended the year 14% greater than the average for the country. RevPar is not far behind; for the entire state of Florida, the 2014 RevPar was 17% greater than the $74 RevPar achieved by the US hotel industry."

All told, the US lodging Industry is experiencing record breaking performance, as evidenced by year-over-year growth in occupancy, ADR, and RevPar. According to Conrow, what places the South Florida hotel marketplace at the top of the charts is a combination of demand generators unique to the region: foreign visitors, the thriving cruise industry, and a key airport expansion.

"Regarding foreign visitation, Florida welcomed 94.7 million visitors in 2014," Conrow says. "More importantly, one out of three foreign visitors to the state, visit South Florida. This is one of the reasons why the Ft. Lauderdale airport is on the heels of an aggressive expansion plan. It welcomed 24.6 million passengers in 2014, only 2.2 million passengers less than New York's LaGuardia Airport. The cruise industry is a crucial contributor to the strong hospitality economy in the region. In 2014, a combined 8.9 million cruise passengers came through Port Everglades and Port Miami. No other cruise port region in the world comes close to this astronomical passenger count."

Stay tuned to GlobeSt.com's Florida edition for more analysis from Conrow later this week. In the meantime, check out this report on how Miami is catching up to New York.