Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
is huge,” said David Travis, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, who
tracks vapor trails from aircraft and published his team's findings in Nature. )
Once commercial flights were back in the air, the routine for inspecting passengers
changed dramatically. It was part of what President Bush declared was a “War on Terror-
ism.” Congress, in near-unanimous votes, expanded federal powers and spent billions of
federal dollars to prevent other criminals from attacking targets in the United States. One
obvious focus of attention was screening passengers, since the hijackers had command-
eered commercial airplanes and used them as missiles.
A five-year-long trend of easing entry to countries around the world came to an abrupt
end in the United States. To protect the country from future attacks the Bush administra-
tion created the Department of Homeland Security. With a budget of $50 billion, it be-
came the largest new department since the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Included in the department was a new Transportation Security Administration responsible
for screening passengers and luggage at U.S. commercial airports.
The TSA is enormous. It employs over 43,000 screeners, more employees than the De-
partments of Labor, and Housing and Urban Development, combined. And those screen-
ers are charged with examining identification papers, airline tickets and luggage of every-
one boarding an airplane in the United States. Thrown together quickly, the TSA has be-
come a lightning rod for complaints about its methods of screening, dictated by the gov-
ernment. When combined with a tightening-up of visa requirements by the State Depart-
ment, the new policies have had an unanticipated and profoundly unwelcome impact on
tourism.
During the first five years of the new policies that began in late 2001, the number of
foreign visitors to the United States plunged by 17 percent. That drop translated into $94
billion in lost revenue as well as $16 billion in tax revenue. In other words, more foreign
tourists visited the United States in 1997 than in 2007. At the same time, record numbers
of foreign tourists traveled the globe, increasing at a 5 percent annual rate from 682 milli-
on to 898 million.
The American tourism industry started to worry about this “lost decade.”
“For sixty years what had determined whether people traveled was the economy; after
September 11 we knew that wasn't the case,” said Geoff Freeman, the chief operating of-
ficer of the U.S. Travel Association, the trade group that represents the travel and tourism
industry. There were all kinds of rumors about the source of the problem: foreigners were
afraid to travel in the United States, or they were angry about the American war in Iraq and
the American xenophobia from well-publicized stunts like changing the name of French
fries to freedom fries.
To understand the problem, the travel association conducted a survey to find out why
foreign tourists were staying away. The answer proved simple and unambiguous and had
nothing to do with geopolitics. The would-be tourists were furious about the difficulty they
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