AMERICA THE EXCEPTIONAL - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 255

Then he outlined his new strategy for tourism aimed at increasing the number of inter-
national tourists, according the industry a greater voice in policy-making, and improve in-
frastructure. He closed with a reminder that the Atlanta Summer Olympics would be the
proving grounds for this new public-private cooperation. “Billions of people will be watch-
ing Atlanta,” he said. “I want to be sure we have done all we could so that these people
have a deep, yearning desire to come to America.”
Once again the audience was on its feet, clapping. Finally the tourism industry would
receive the respect it deserved. The strategy called for private industry to work with the
government, which would collect data showing tourism's economic power; promote the
United States as the “international destination of choice”; and once foreign visitors were
here, to insure that they would have “an experience second to none.”
Gingrich, a representative from Georgia, would not be deterred. He pushed through
Congress a budget that essentially zeroed out the tourism office. On the eve of the 1996
Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the United States essentially abolished the thirty-five-year-
old tourism administration in the Department of Commerce along with most of its work in
U.S. embassies. Greg Farmer, the undersecretary of commerce for travel and tourism who
was overseeing the effort said: “It's an absolute outrage that we're not promoting ourselves
during the Olympics.”
Farmer's job was abolished along with the travel administration; a tourism office was re-
configured within Commerce as a smaller agency largely concerned with gathering travel
and tourism statistics. Representative Toby Roth, Republican of Wisconsin, who was co-
chairman of the congressional caucus on travel and tourism, accurately predicted the out-
come of his party's move to abolish the travel office without a true alternative. “Our share
of the world market will keep dropping.”
The United States also withdrew from the U.N. tourism agency in 1996. When the
agency was elevated to full-fledged status as the U.N. World Tourism Organization in
2003, the United States refused to rejoin, citing budget pressures. Under the cloud of the
Republican mandate, all meetings of the Tourism Policy Council were suspended, end-
ing the confab that brought together the secretaries of major government departments
like Transportation, Interior, Labor, and Housing and Urban Development to coordinate
policies to enhance tourism. In advance of the White House conference, the TPC had
created a system for coordinating the thirty federal agencies that affect travel and tour-
ism—the first such system.
Among the unanswered questions was, why did the Republican Party single out tourism
at such a pivotal moment when the government was finally coordinating a single coherent
policy to take advantage of the phenomenal growth in travel, which was the second-largest
employer in the country, the largest service export, and which contributed 6 percent dir-
ectly to the country's GDP? For instance, the Republicans left unchallenged funding for
agriculture that continues to receive multibillion-dollar subsidies, and the official charged