Survey: U.S. Least Friendly Country to Travelers

Travel Blog  •  Michael Yessis  •  11.21.06 | 7:31 AM ET

It’s rude immigration officials and difficulty obtaining travel documents—not to mention the country’s current image in most of the world—that have travelers avoiding the U.S., according to a survey of 2011 non-U.S. residents released Monday by the Discover America Partnership. “Since 9/11 this country has viewed foreign travellers as more of a threat than an opportunity,” Geoff Freeman, the director of Discover America Partnership, said Monday in a conference call with reporters, according to a Reuters report. “They [border officials] do not understand that foreign travellers are also key to our national security: they go home as ambassadors for our country.”

The Discover America Partnership, as we mentioned previously, is an organization of United States travel industry representatives that seeks to boost the levels of visitors to the country and to enlist Americans as “citizen diplomats.” The organization’s survey, which can be read in full here, is the latest effort to shine a light on what it believes to be a crisis situation.

Travel Industry Association statistics show that the U.S. share in world tourism declined from 7.4 percent in 2000 to 6 percent last year. A one-percentage point increase, according to the association, would mean 7.5 million additional arrivals, $12.3 billion in additional spending, 150,000 additional U.S. jobs, $3.3 billion in additional payroll and $2.1. billion in additional taxes.

 



1 Comment for Survey: U.S. Least Friendly Country to Travelers

Ron Mader 11.23.06 | 2:28 PM ET

As the reputation of the United States and Usians in general continues to tank around the world—America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked (http://tinyurl.com/s5xmg)—we might want to ask if there are things we could be doing differently, either as a country or as citizens in boosting world opinion about the US of A.

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