U.S. Travel CEOs: Tourism Faces Growth Bottlenecks—Full Video

31.10.2023 - 21:31 / skift.com / Geoff Freeman / Dawit Habtemariam / Fred Dixon

The U.S. can’t effectively compete for tourists if there isn’t energy at the federal level toward tackling issues like excessive visa wait times, upgrading outdated airports and staffing the TSA and FAA.

NYC Tourism + Conventions CEO and President Fred Dixon and U.S. Travel Association CEO and President Geoff Freeman discussed a range of long-term issues slowing the growth of the travel industry at the Skift Global Forum in New York City. 

(You can watch the full video and read the transcript below.)

Dixon also talked about what the impact of New York City’s crackdown on Airbnb will be on tourism to the Big Apple. Freeman advised the travel industry to lower their expectations about the assistant secretary for travel and tourism’s ability to make their jobs easier. Both touched on why large cities will need tourism to makeup for the loss of office commuter spending as remote and hybrid work becomes permanent.

Interview Transcript:

Dawit Habtemariam: So happy to have you guys here today. So the major topic for today will be the future of travel growth. All right, so as we start, let’s go over some big news happening right now. As everybody knows, the U.S. government is on the risk of shutting down. Unfortunately, U.S. lawmakers have not agreed on a federal budget to fund the government. So if they don’t get a federal budget passed by Saturday, September 30th, the U.S. government will shut down. Geoff, you head the U.S. Travel Association, your ears are on the ground, you know what’s happening in DC. How likely is this going to happen and what will be the impact to the U.S. travel industry?

Geoff Freeman: Well, I think we all read the same news. We see many of the same things and everything you hear about the dysfunction in Washington is true. So our expectation is that a shutdown will happen and unfortunately there isn’t really a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of what’s going to resolve it. And the reason for that is not because you don’t have a lot of people in Washington on both sides of the aisle who are ready to solve the problem, it’s that you have too many, five to 10, who seem to exist to throw sticks in the spokes who want to simply cause problems rather than solve problems. So these five to 10 people are putting their selfish interests ahead of those of millions of travelers and plenty of other people every day. So I expect that they will succeed in getting what they want and it will cause problems.

We know of course, that when it comes to air travel, TSA and air traffic controllers still have to come to work or are still required to come to work. But we’ve seen in past shutdowns that the longer this goes on, people think twice about not getting paid to come to work. And even