Hurting travel sector blames foreign policy

WASHINGTON – Democrats and liberal academics have been complaining for years that President Bush’s foreign policy has turned the United States into an international pariah.

Now they have an unexpected ally: Disneyland.

The international travel business is thriving everywhere – except in the United States, whose share of global tourism is plummeting in step with America’s image around the world.

The nation’s tourism industry says hostility toward the U.S. role in Iraq has kept foreigners out of the United States in droves, and security restrictions designed to keep the United States safe from terrorists are unnecessarily restrictive and stoking anti-Americanism worldwide.

In an effort to change that, representatives of the travel industry – as large as the Disney Co. and as small as the Des Moines (Iowa) Conference and Travel Bureau – are converging on Washington today to launch the Discover America Partnership, which aims to restore some of the billions of dollars in international tourism that the U.S. has lost in the first half of this decade.

“Tourism is booming around the world, and we’re not participating in it,” said Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. He also heads the U.S. Travel and Tourism Advisory Board, a group of 14 industry executives that works closely with the Commerce Department.

The board told the department last week that the U.S. had lost billions of dollars and millions of jobs as its overall share of foreign travel fell from 9 percent to 6 percent from 2000 to 2005.

Driving the drop are tensions surrounding the Iraq war, terrorism and difficult U.S. relationships with some countries. Between 2000 and 2006, surveys by the Pew Research Center showed a plunge in the percentage of people holding favorable opinions of the United States: from 83 percent to 56 percent in Britain, 78 percent to 37 percent in Germany, 50 percent to 23 percent in Spain and 77 percent to 63 percent in Japan.

Then there are the security restrictions put in place after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Tourism executives shake their heads at the thought of Indians who have to wait up to 100 days for a U.S. travel visa. They tell of Brazilians who must travel hundreds of miles to one of the four facilities in all of Brazil where, for $100, they apply in person for a visa.

“Many legitimate potential international visitors now deliberately avoid travel to the U.S. due to real and perceived barriers to entry,” said the Travel and Tourism Advisory Board.

A survey in June by the Travel Industry Association, an advocacy group for the tourism business, found that 77 percent of travel agents worldwide believed that the United States was more difficult to visit than other countries.

“We’re not a welcoming country,” said Geoff Freeman, executive director of the Discover America Partnership.

That will become even stronger in January, at least for travelers in the Western Hemisphere, when the U.S. will require that everyone entering the United States from another country in this hemisphere have a passport. That includes American citizens, who are used to showing only a driver’s license or a similar form of identification when returning from quick trips across the border into Canada or Mexico.

Disney’s Rasulo, in his capacity as chairman of the Travel Industry Association, is spearheading the Discover America Partnership. He suggested the possibility of government funding of tourism promotion, possibly in the form of an exit tax on foreigners as they leave the United States.