The good news for a tourism destination like Duluth is that the international travel industry has grown by 40 percent over the past decade; to heck with post-Sept. 11 worries and the dismal global economy, apparently.
The bad news is that Duluth, like the rest of our nation, has largely missed out. The international travel market here has remained stagnant. Or worse: According to Oxford Economics and Commerce Department data, the U.S. share of overseas arrivals fell from 17 percent to 12.4 percent since 2000. Each percentage point lost costs the U.S. another 161,000 jobs.
A big part of the problem, according to U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has been the excessively long time it takes for foreign travelers to receive U.S. tourist visas. As an example, Klobuchar said, travelers from Brazil can wait up to 150 days to obtain a U.S. tourist visa while their wait for a similar visa to the United Kingdom is about 12 days. Which destination do you think Brazilian travelers are picking?
Klobuchar has a solution in mind. She and Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri introduced bipartisan legislation this week to shorten the time it takes to get U.S. tourist visas. The measure would return fees to the State Department as an incentive to improve the process, would waive some in-person interviews when renewing visas, and would require the State Department to report to Congress about how it could better incorporate Commerce data.
"Tourism is a powerful engine for job creation in Minnesota and local communities across the country," Klobuchar said in a statement this week. "By making it easier to travel to the United States without compromising important national security safeguards we can stimulate local economies and help our businesses grow and thrive."
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By not doing all we can to tap into the growing international travel industry, Duluth and the U.S. are missing out on the $4,000 each overseas visitor to the U.S. spends on average, spending that supports 1.1 million American jobs.
Tourism is Minnesota's fifth-largest industry, generating $11 billion in annual sales and providing nearly 11 percent of total private-sector employment. Imagine the good news if we started tapping into even more of the booming international travel industry as many other nations already are doing around the globe.
