Jun 25, 2007
Why hasn't travel to the United States soared?
I recently spent a day fielding phone calls from persons who have just returned from the World Travel and Tourism Conference in Lisbon. The subject of their news: the calamitous drop in the amount of incoming travel to the United States.Since 2000, tourism to the United States from abroad has declined by 10%. Though all nations lost tourism in the immediate wake of September 11, virtually all other nations have made up the deficit and forged ahead. Since 2000, tourism to Britain has increased by 13%. Tourism to Australia has increased by 21%. Tourism to France has increased by 20%.
If tourism to the United States had increased over the past six years, the nation would have benefited enormously. For every one percentage point of additional foreign travel to the United States, our country would have enjoyed 12.3 billion dollars in additional income, 150,000 new jobs, 3.3 billion dollars in extra payroll, $2.1 billion dollars in additional tax revenues.
Why have we lost incoming tourism? In these days of a weak dollar, the U.S. has become a remarkably cheap country for most foreign tourists; by all rights, our incoming tourism should have soared. The overwhelming consensus of the World Travel and Tourism Conference was that we have made it extraordinarily difficult for most foreign tourists to obtain visas for travel into the United States. In some countries, it requires several weeks simply to make an appointment to apply for such a visa at a U.S. consulate. Let me repeat that: not only is the application process a long-term procedure, but it requires several weeks simply to make an appointment to make an application!
As in so many other areas, the situation results from the sheer incompetence of the current administration. With so much at stake, with so much income, including tax income, to be enjoyed through added tourism, with so favorable a time for incoming tourism because of the weak U.S. dollar, the failure to create smooth and reasonably quick procedures for the issuance of visas is a catastrophic oversight, matched by so many similar oversights by the executive branch of government. Remember the response to Hurricane Katrina?
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Fifty years ago, 
Arthur Frommer is generally acknowledged to be the nation's foremost travel authority. He is the founder of the
