摘要: |
This report presents data on international travel to and from the United States. It combines data from a variety of sources to provide a more complete picture of U.S.-international travel than is available from individual sources. This report breaks out travel trends (inbound and outbound) with overseas (noncontiguous) countries and our North American neighbors, Canada and Mexico, which account for the greatest number of foreign travelers to the United States. A large number of people travel to and from the United States each year, making use of U.S. and foreign transportation carriers and infrastructure and generating a large amount of economic activity. The magnitude of this travel, involving nearly 340 million visits into and out of the United States in 2004, has far-reaching implications for planning transportation infrastructure, for tourism-related economic development, and for security, both in terms of terrorism concerns and planning for a possible global pandemic. The majority of the travel data in the report covers the period 2000 through 2004, allowing for comparison of international travel in the year immediately preceding and three years following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Compared to 2000, there were notably fewer U.S.-international trips taken from 2001 to 2004. The lowest period of international travel was in 2003. A prior RITA/BTS report in this series focuses on the travel trends between 1990 and 2000; however, for the convenience of the reader an appendix has been included to show trends from 1990 through 2004. |