America’s war on tourists:

Global tourism legend and guidebook publisher to every corner of the globle Arthur Frommer said in the Chicago Tribune over the weekend that he recently spent a day fielding phone calls from people who had just returned from the World Travel & Tourism Conference in Lisbon.

The subject of their news: the calamitous drop in the amount of incoming travel to the United States.

His report says: –

Since 2000, tourism to the United States from abroad has declined by 10%.

Though all nations lost tourism in the immediate wake of 9/11, 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 throughout 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 per year in additional income, 150,000 new jobs, $3.3 billion in extra payroll and $2.1 billion in additional tax revenues.

Why have we lost incoming tourism?

In these days of a weak U.S. dollar, the U.S. has become a remarkably cheap country for most foreign tourists, so by all rights, our incoming tourism should have soared.

The overwhelming consensus of the WTTC 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 time-consuming procedure, but it requires a several-week wait for an appointment to apply for the visa!

As if the failure to issue visas expeditiously weren’t bad enough, the Department of Homeland Security is proposing (as reported in the trade press on June 25) to create additional obstacles to those foreign citizens who don’t need visas to travel here.

Under the Visa Waiver Program, citizens of 27 countries (like Great Britain and Ireland) don’t require visas; the department is proposing that these exempt individuals, in advance of departure, provide the U.S. with biographical data and their proposed travel plans within the U.S.  They would then receive electronic authorization to proceed with their plans.

A nation that cannot issue visas on time is now expecting to review the travel plans of millions of additional foreign tourists and quickly approve their trips here.

How would such a requirement prevent a terrorist from simply e-mailing that he is planning to visit friends and relatives?  In what way do these new obstacles protect us?  And don’t they simply discourage tourists from coming here?

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.

The further proposal to require that foreigners advise us in writing of their plans is loonier still.

The entire situation calls for intervention by grown-ups.

Report by The Mole