Tourists Finding It's a Big World After All

WASHINGTON — Democrats and liberal academics have been complaining for years that President Bush's foreign policy has turned the United States into an international pariah.

Now they have an unexpected ally: Disneyland.

The international travel business is thriving everywhere -- except in the United States, whose share of global tourism is plummeting in step with America's image around the world.

The nation's tourism industry says hostility toward the U.S. role in Iraq has kept foreigners out of the United States in droves, and security restrictions designed to keep the United States safe from terrorists are unnecessarily restrictive and stoking anti-Americanism worldwide.

In an effort to change that, representatives of the travel industry -- as large as the Disney Co. and as small as the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau -- are converging on Washington today to launch the Discover America Partnership, which aims to restore some of the billions of dollars in international tourism that the U.S. lost in the first half of this decade.

"Tourism is booming around the world, and we're not participating in it," said Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. He also heads the U.S. Travel and Tourism Advisory Board, a group of 14 industry executives that works closely with the Commerce Department.

The board told the department last week that the United States had lost billions of dollars and millions of jobs as its overall share of foreign travel fell from 9% to 6% from 2000 to 2005.

Los Angeles -- second to New York in the number of foreign visitors -- suffered a decline as well, with more than 3.5 million international tourists in 2000 and 2.5 million five years later, according to Commerce Department statistics.

Driving the drop are tensions surrounding the Iraq war, terrorism and difficult U.S. relationships with some countries. Between 2000 and 2006, surveys by the Pew Research Center showed a plunge in the percentage of people holding favorable opinions of the United States: from 83% to 56% in Britain, 78% to 37% in Germany, 50% to 23% in Spain and 77% to 63% in Japan.

Then there are the security restrictions put in place after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Tourism executives shake their heads at the thought of Indians who have to wait up to 100 days for a U.S. travel visa. They tell of Brazilians who must travel hundreds of miles to one of the four facilities in Brazil where, for $100, they apply in person for a visa.