Number of visitors to U.S. falling

Opinion: March 6, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

WASHINGTON

A Richardson, Texas, semiconductor gets shipped to a Chinese customer. That’s an export.

A foreign visitor lands at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. That, too, is a U.S. export.

Foreign visitors spent $121.6 billion last year on travel and airfares, which helped the nation’s balance of trade.

Exports offset the American appetite for debt. They reduce our need to borrow from abroad to pay for all the things we import. And foreign customers are welcome in lean times, because they help offset the decline in consumer spending among Americans.

Yet consider this: A study for the U.S. Travel Association estimates we lost $509 billion in travel exports between 2000 and 2009. In a decade where the nation’s trade deficit was more than $5.5 trillion, we lost a chance to reduce the deficit by $270 billion just from international travel.

The study by Oxford Economics found the number of international travelers was up nearly 200 percent worldwide in the last decade but fell 9 percent for the United States.

The travel association calls it “The Lost Decade.”

For reasons well understood, it’s a lot harder to visit America than it was before Sept. 11, 2001.

Visitors from many countries need to go to a U.S. embassy or consulate to be interviewed before they can get a visa.

The United States lost a lot of goodwill during the decade as well, for reasons as varied as the war in Iraq and the global financial crisis that started on Wall Street.

Big spenders

Foreign tourists spend an average of $4,500 apiece when they visit the United States. (Visitors from other parts of the country spend $800 to $1,000, said Phillip Jones, president of the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau).

“These are not happy times,” said Vic Drabicky, international marketing director of Fort Worth’s Range Online Media, which does advertising and promotional work for the travel industry.

“Now is the time to lay the groundwork for next two, three and five years,” said Drabicky.

With help from the federal government, the national travel industry is trying to do that. Last week, the Senate approved creation of a travel promotion corporation that is slated to spend as much as $200 million a year touting the United States as a destination and explaining security and entry requirements.

The House passed the measure last year, and President Barack Obama has indicated he’ll sign it.

The corporation is to be funded by a $10-per-visitor fee on travelers from visa waiver countries, matched by cash or in-kind contributions from the U.S. travel industry.

The European Union isn’t happy about the fee. EU Ambassador John Bruton calls it “a tax on tourists to encourage tourism.”

NOT UNIQUE

Maura Gast, executive director of the Irving Convention and Visitors Bureau, shrugged off Bruton’s complaint and said travel fees are common worldwide. She argued that a campaign promoting travel to the United States would help attract both leisure and business travelers to Texas.

“You can’t accept an invitation you don’t receive,” she said. “All these countries we don’t consider America’s peer in business are kicking our rear ends in the best of what we have to offer.”

Jim Landers is a columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.