AMERICA THE EXCEPTIONAL - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 265

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During the 2012 presidential race the U.S. travel industry found itself in the unaccus-
tomed position of getting everything it wanted. In January, President Obama showed up
at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where he joked about his big ears in the shadow of
Mickey Mouse. He announced a committee to create a federal task force on tourism to
attract millions more tourists to places like Florida, which would be an important state in
the November elections.
In April he welcomed Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to the White House and an-
nounced that the United States was opening two more consulates in Brazil to lure more
tourists to the United States. Those planeloads arriving from the south, along with those
coming to the United States from China, were seen as instant stimulus packages. On aver-
age, every Brazilian visiting the United States spent $5,400; every Chinese spent $6,243.
In May 2012, President Obama tied together his tourism initiatives into one 33-page-
long National Travel and Tourism Strategy. “We want the world to know there has not
been a better time to visit the U.S., and America is truly open for business,” said John
Bryson, Secretary of Commerce, in a telephone press conference.
The strategy is the first of its kind. It reverses nearly every policy instituted since 1996,
when Newt Gingrich engineered the elimination of the U.S. Travel and Tourism Admin-
istration, and the policies of successive Republican officials who believed government did
not belong in tourism. The strategy also addresses the steep drop in foreign tourism after
September 11. It notes that the “security requirement instituted in the aftermath of the
September 11, 2001 attacks, although effective at ensuring the safety of travelers and the
nation may have contributed to an impression among some that the United States does
not welcome international visitors.”
New Yorkers who have to navigate through summer sidewalks crowded with foreign
tourists may be skeptical about this claim of a dearth of visitors. As the government has
reformed visa and border policies, New York City has seen tourism rise to over 10 million
a year. (This is a city of 8 million.) Europeans have been known to fly into New York to
scoop up bargains in the stores as well as party all night, and while they may not make up
for the numbers of Europeans staying away, many New Yorkers think there are already too
many.
The government promises to employ a dozen or more new “welcome strategies,” from
basic politeness at airports, to hiring people who speak foreign languages, to streamlining
border inspections. The inability of Americans to speak foreign languages is a perennial
problem for the industry. And all of the federal government's efforts would be coordinated
through a revived national travel and tourism office at the Department of Commerce.
Timed for peak summer travel season, the new strategy has immediate and long-range
goals. Hopefully the new and diverse promotion campaigns would spread the word that