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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.
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