New Web site to help inspire Americans to explore the U.S.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new Web site has been launched to help Americans explore their own country: DiscoverAmerica.com.

DiscoverAmerica.com includes an interactive map that gives mileage from city to city, an activity finder listing more than 3,000 experiences, attractions and events, including museums, gardens, ski slopes, festivals and parks; and links to travel-booking sites like Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia and Priceline.

The site also offers links to tourism information for all 50 states, as well as for more than 100 cities and other destinations. In addition, DiscoverAmerica.com offers content from the National Park Service, the National Scenic Byways program and useful Web sites like GoogleMaps and Weather.com.

DiscoverAmerica.com is billed as the official tourism site for the U.S. and was created by the U.S. Travel Association, formerly known as the Travel Industry Association, which is based in Washington.

The target audience for the site, according to U.S. Travel spokesman Greg Staley, is “U.S. leisure travelers who have not pinpointed ‘where to go’ or ‘when to travel’ or ‘what to do.’”

The site offers photo galleries organized by location, with pictures of everything from a historic district in New Braunfels, Texas, to wild horses in North Carolina’s Currituck Outer Banks, to the Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway in the Shasta Cascade region of California, to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.

Visitors can also upload their own images and comments about places they’ve been by clicking on the “Stories” link at www.discoveramerica.com.

U.S. Travel is not a government agency, but it was authorized by the U.S. Commerce Department to develop and market an official travel planning Web site targeting the top five international markets that send visitors to the U.S. — Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany. Launching DiscoverAmerica.com for domestic travelers was an outgrowth of the outreach to inernational visitors, Staley said.