US Travel Association Issues Visa Challenge to Presidential Administration

07.05.2024 - 18:50 / travelpulse.com / North America / Geoff Freeman / Mia Taylor

Los Angeles, California — The United States has “serious problems” when it comes to international inbound travel that must be resolved if the country is to regain its competitive edge.

That’s the assessment of the U.S. Travel Association and its leader Geoff Freeman, the organization’s president and CEO.

Freeman delivered his sober take on the problems plaguing inbound travel to the United States during a press conference today in Los Angeles, California where a travel industry convention is taking place.

“The United States remains the world’s most desired nation to visit, but at the end of 2019 we had 79 million visitors internationally and in 2023 we had 67 million international visitors," Freeman told the media gathered for the IPW 2024 convention. “That’s only 84 percent of pre-pandemic levels.”

“When you look at travel as an export - before the pandemic we had a 12 billion [person] travel trade surplus. At end of last year we had about a 50 billion [person] travel trade deficit,” Freeman added.

There's a handful of challenges that the United States currently faces when it comes to attracting international visitors and significantly ramping up inbound numbers, said Freeman. And some of those challenges are within the country’s ability to fix, while others are not.

There’s not much that can be done, for instance, about the strength of the U.S. dollar, which makes this country very expensive to visit from many other parts of the world. Similarly, there’s not much U.S. officials can do about the current prohibitions surrounding flights over Russian airspace, which pose a major obstacle for airlines coming to this country from China.

However, visa wait times continue to be a significant roadblock for international visitors — and that’s an issue U.S. officials can — and should — be able to fix, Freeman said.

“On the visa side, I checked this morning — if you're a Columbian and want to come to the U.S. the wait times are over 600 days to get an interview at a U.S. consulate,” said Freeman. “If you’re in Mexico, the wait times are over 800 days.”

By contrast, for visitors from India the wait timeline for visa interviews has recently been reduced to a somewhat more reasonable 150 to 200 days. Similarly, wait times for those visiting from Brazil have been reduced drastically — from what was once 500 days down to just 21 days, according to the U.S. Travel Association.

“It shows us that it can be done. When the State Department uses their ingenuity and gets creative and puts resources in the right places, this problem can be solved,” explained Freeman. “But it’s been going on for far too long. It needs to be solved now.”

In a bold move to help push the needle and get the visa problem solved, Freeman said that the U.S.