This item appeared yesterday on the New York Times blog. It raises the question: does the USA need a national tourism board, and would it help the country's brand or not?
Bill to Create U.S. Tourism Board
By Lionel Beehner
The number of foreign visitors to the United States in 2009 was 9
percent below 2000. A new bill that passed the Senate last week, and is
expected to be signed into law, aims to reverse that trend.
The Travel Promotion Act would create a national tourism board to
develop ad campaigns and raise awareness of United States security and
visa procedures. The tourism board would be financed by a $10 fee on
foreign visitors who do not need a visa to enter the United States.
The travel industry has long advocated for a tourism board, arguing
that the United States is one of the few industrialized nations without
one. A January 2010 study by Oxford Economics, a forecasting and
research group in Britain, estimated that a tourism bureau would bring
in 1.6 million additional foreign visitors yearly, as well as pump
about $4 billion into the U.S. economy.
Critics of the bill, including some Republicans and some airline
industry representatives, say that the slump in foreign tourism is not
a public relations issue, but rather a result of strict immigration
rules that subject visitors to unwelcoming, and even humiliating
procedures.
You need to be a member of Tripatini to add comments!
Replies
An agency is very likely to have some impact, but its success or failure will depend on the remit, its power, it´s budget and most importantly the quality of the people it hires. Governments and government quangos don´t have a great record in good hires anywhere in the world as far as I can tell from the comments of locals, so for sure resources spent this way will not get max ROI, but for a miracle.
The government would do better to appoint a roster of specialist agencies and have them work together to sell America on the one hand, and make sure that the industry is fully enaged in the process on the other. With one agency tasked to co-ordinate the whole. All of them should be on preferomance based renewable contracts and only working on projects where success is mesaurable.
Excellent discussion point.
In theory a national tourism board sounds a good idea. However, in practice, chances are, they and their appointed branding agency would develop communication strategies which are totally off-code ie. Brand America's cultural source code within America is DREAM (verbalised as Home of the American Dream).
To add cultural insult to injury, the markets they target such as Germany and England (two of the world's greatest traveller nations) would probably also be off-code:
The code for England in America is CLASS (verbalised as the Home of the World's Language) and for America in England is ABUNDANTLY BIG. While the code for Germany in America is ORDER and for America in Germany is JOHN WAYNE.
Witness Brand England's national tourism board's latest totally off-code campaign: The Aroma of England