My grandtwins are calling. I’ll see you in January!

The big news is a vote by the Senate Appropriations Committee aimed at improving and easing U.S. visa policies to attract more foreign tourists to the United States, trying to turn around a decade’s worth of effort to discourage tourists from arriving on our shores. Among much else, the bill contains several important directives to the State Department about how visas are processed:

A requirement that the State Department submit a report outlining a five-year forecast of demand for nonimmigrant visas in Brazil, China and India, and a plan to meet that demand;

A required assessment by the State Department comparing their five-year forecast to the Commerce Department’s five-year visitor arrival projections from Brazil, China and India;

Steps to hire a sufficient number of consular officers, which may include limited non-career appointment officers, in China, Brazil and India to meet the Department of State’s standard of interviewing all tourist visa applicants within 30 days of the date of submitting their application;

Discretion allowing the State Department to carry out a secure visa videoconferencing pilot program;

The bill directs the State Department to study the costs and benefits if waiving the visa interview for certain Chinese nationals who previously held a U.S. visa.

Don’t assume that State opposes all this work. They don’t and they are actually moving ahead of the game on several fronts. It is several other security-oriented agencies that would rather have no foreigners cross our borders. State is pulling out all the stops to speed tourist and business visa processing, and is on track to increase visa throughput in Brazil by 41% this year and in China by 34%. I haven’t seen a number for India, but understand the growth rate in visa issuance is similar.

But Hawaii doesn’t seem to recognize these travelers. True, their numbers are dwarfed by the continuing, though dwindling, Japan travel trade. And the growth in travelers from South Korea and China is impressive. Part of the problem is that official Hawaii and much of the tourism industry honestly believe that a travel trade can’t be built without non-stop flights. But Europeans put the lie to that. Sure, they would prefer non-stops, like anybody else, but they don’t let that put a stop to reaching a destination. Their numbers may be small, but they spend a fair amount and tend to stay for a long visit – and that is with virtually no official promotion to attract them.

Actually, I am impressed with how much promotion Hawaii’s contractor for Western Europe, AVIAREPS, gets done on a shoestring budget, even if their contract restricts them to Germany and the British Isles. AVIAREPS recently released the travel numbers for Western Europeans going to Hawaii during the first seven months of 2011: 50,862 travelers or an increase of 6.9%. Not bad considering the state of European economies this year.

What is interesting is where the growth came from. Germany is always the largest of the European markets for Hawaii and saw growth of 7.1% January through July. But this is also Western Europe’s strongest economy. From a smaller base, travelers from France grew by 8.4%, but that is still less than five thousand visitors. The really impressive performance was from those snowy mountains in Switzerland: 6,269 tourists and a growth rate of 29.7%! And this is a market that AVIAREPS isn’t contracted to cover, though there is spillover from their German campaigns. Again, the number is small, but these travelers are high-spending and long-staying. Good to hear a little Swiss German on the slopes of Diamond Head. I look forward to a little yodeling.