U.S. & World Travel – By The Numbers
Ready for Visitors
Tourism is Hawaii’s top industry, but it is pretty important to the United States and, indeed, to the entire world. Whether you call it the tourism industry, the hospitality industry, the visitor industry or the travel industry, tourism has been a major influence on the world for centuries. Pleasure travelers were a privileged few until the 20th century, but those earlier tourists set the tone for the rest of us – and we merrily followed them beginning in the 1950s. Something to do with the emergence of jet-powered passenger aircraft.
The World Travel & Tourism Council computes a global travel and tourism GDP. Their numbers aren’t exact, given that they combine stats from all countries – some of which don’t even produce such numbers. But they are still a good estimate of trends and orders of magnitude. The Council forecasts that world travel GDP will be about US$5.75 trillion this year, growing to more than $11 trillion within a decade – almost doubling. They say that travel and tourism provided humanity with more than 235 million jobs last year and they think that will be over 303 million by 2020. To bring it down to our level, that would be one job out of 11 – worldwide! World export earnings from travel (imports, too, if you think about it) will be over US$1 trillion this year.
What do they see for the United States? WTTC forecasts U.S. travel and tourism GDP at a shade less than $1.4 trillion in 2010, compared to our total GDP of about $57 trillion in 2009. That makes travel and tourism a little more than 2% of the American economy, and they expect our travel and tourism GDP to grow to nearly $2.5 trillion in 2020.
Those numbers include all travel, both international and domestic, and most of America’s travel GDP is domestic. If you live in Hawaii and travel to paddle in an outrigger canoe race on Lake Las Vegas (hey, I do that every October!), that is counted in travel GDP. Same for the business trip to Detroit. Since my interest is travel and tourism as an export industry, I need to back those numbers out and take a look at them. Fortunately, WTTC has already done it. They show U.S. travel and tourism exports as likely to hit close to $141 billion this year; that’s money spent by foreign travelers coming to the United States, whether for business, pleasure, schooling, whatever the reason for the travel. The WTTC number is slightly below the U.S. Department of Commerce figures for 2008, which showed exports of $142 billion, but I won’t quibble. What is interesting is that WTTC expects U.S. travel and tourism exports to grow to $295 billion by 2020. That’s 109% growth for the decade! With that kind of consistent growth, we’re bound to hear about a travel and leisure ETF any day now.
Almost everything above relies on estimates, guesstimates and forecasts. The latest “real” numbers from the Commerce Department for U.S. travel and tourism exports go only through November 2009. Through November, the United States drew about 44 million international visitors, down from the same period in 2008. Those 40 million spent more than $111 billion while they were here, but that was down by nearly 15% from 2008. (Good I thing I didn’t quibble with the WTTC in the previous paragraph. Looks like a recessionary drop in 2009, with expected growth nearly back to 2008 levels in 2010. Not unreasonable, but also not guaranteed.)
Bringing them in
Finally, where are all these travelers coming from? And where are they going? We have to go back to Commerce’s 2008 data (the latest full year available) to answer these. So, which state is the big winner for attracting travelers? (Imagine a drum roll here.) New York, by an overwhelming margin. Fully one-third of all visitors to the United States are headed for New York, most of those just to New York City. Nothing else comes close. California and Florida are next up with about 21% apiece (ah, the magic of the mouse). Nevada wins about 8%, followed by Hawaii with roughly 7%. But the big surprise for me was Guam, a magnet for 4.7% of visitors to the United States in 2008 – though they don’t generally stay for long. Mostly quick trips from Japan for sun and sand.
48% of our foreign customers came from Western Europe, led by the United Kingdom with almost 18% of the total, so you aren’t imagining those British accents in the shops of Manhattan. But look to Asia for our next biggest market for travelers: Japan with more than 13%. Some of our other top sources? Germany (with 7%), France (4.7%), Italy and Brazil (3.1% each), South Korea (3%), Spain and Australia (tied with 2.6%). I noticed an oddity about Commerce’s statistics: travelers from Canada and Mexico weren’t included. I assume all the day-trippers across the border would overwhelm everything else and skew the picture.
Enough of all these numbers! The next post in this series will take a deeper look at Hawaii’s international tourism industry.
