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GAO-12-485R 1 (2012-03-21)

handle is hein.gao/gaobacfwc0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Accountability * Integrity * Reliability United States Government Accountability Office Washington, DC 20548 March 21, 2012 Congressional Committees Subject: Corporation for Travel Promotion: Establishment and Planned Programmatic Activities According to the Department of Commerce (Commerce), the travel and tourism industry generates nearly $1.1 trillion in economic output for the U.S. economy and supports more than 7.5 million U.S. jobs each year. Even though the United States received more than 60 million visitors in 2010, a 2009 congressional report1 noted a decline in the U.S. share of the international travel market from 9.4 percent in 1992 to 6.2 percent in 2007. Concern over this decline led Congress to explore efforts to reinvigorate the tourism industry and recapture lost market share. According to the report, government officials and other experts identified the lack of a coordinated international marketing campaign as a primary factor contributing to this decline. The U.S. Travel and Tourism Advisory Board, which advises Commerce, also cited this lack of coordination and recommended the creation of a national tourism policy. To address this issue, Congress established the Corporation for Travel Promotion (CTP) under the Travel Promotion Act of 2009 to create and execute a nationally coordinated travel promotion program.2 This legislation, enacted in March of 2010, also mandates GAO to review CTP's programmatic activities within 2 years of its enactment. As we informed your offices in briefings and other communications on our preliminary findings in December 2011, the CTP is in the early stages of planning and is beginning to implement major programmatic activities to promote travel to the United States. In this report, we expand upon our earlier briefings to describe (1) the status of CTP's establishment and (2) the activities CTP has planned and undertaken to promote travel and tourism to the United States. Enclosure I contains our briefing slides from December 2011, which have been updated for clarity. To determine the status of CTP's establishment and the activities CTP has planned to promote travel to the United States, we reviewed pertinent CTP planning, budget, and legal documents, and interviewed CTP officials. We also interviewed an official with the accounting firm that conducted CTP's first mandated financial audit. We sought to obtain data on the impact CTP activities have had on travel to the United States, though such metrics are still under development. We conducted this performance audit from September 2011 to March 2012 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a 1S. Rep No. 111-25, 111 th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 2 (2009). 2pub. Law 111-145, sec. 9. GAO-1 2-485R Corporation for Travel Promotion Page 1

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