Travel Promotion Act and Unfunded Mandates
Although the House of Representatives has now passed the same Travel Promotion Act earlier passed by the Senate, the bill must be passed a second time by the Senate because all legislation dealing with revenue (in this case, from the fee that will be paid by travelers from visa waiver countries) must pass the House first under the Constitution. It is not know yet when the bill will be scheduled for that second Senate vote, but it should be relatively soon. Final enactment is expected, ending nearly fifteen years that the U.S. as a nation has been without an international tourism marketing program. The bill incorporates a recommendation strongly urged by ARVC that the new international marketing program "identify opportunities and strategies to promote tourism to rural and urban areas equally, including areas not traditionally visited by international visitors."
Also, as recommended by ARVC, the TPA authorizes a substantial expansion of the research and development activities of the Department of Commerce, specifically including an expansion of the number of inbound air travelers sampled by the Survey of International Travelers to reach a 1 percent sample size and revising the design and format of the questionnaires to improve response rates to at least double the number of States and cities with reliable international visitor estimates and developing estimates of international traveler expenditures on a State-by-State basis.
Unfortunately, in an anomaly not unusual in Congressional legislation, this turns out to be an "unfunded mandate" for OTTI because although the TPA authorizes appropriation of "such funds as may be necessary to carry out this section," there is at this time no additional money in either the 2010 Commerce Department appropriations bill (passed by the Senate but not yet by the House) or in the 2011 budget being developed in the Department. (All revenue from the new visa waiver traveler fee is devoted to the international tourism marketing program.) Little can be done, of course,until the TPA finally becomes law, but we are, however, consulting with friends in Congress and with other tourism-related organizations to see what can be done to support this needed OTTI funding.