President Obama announced plans to increase travel to the United States from Disney World's Main Street, USA.

Thursday at Disney World in Orlando, President Barack Obama announced an executive order aimed at boosting international tourism visits to the United States. The initiative is getting a positive reception from the travel industry, which has advocated for years for some of the changes the new order includes. David Scowsill, president and CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council, called it “a major step forward for the world’s biggest travel and tourism economy,” according to eTurboNews.

The President’s order includes plans aimed at promoting the United States as a travel destination and several moves that will make it easier for visitors to enter the country. It expands the visa waiver and Global Entry programs and calls for the creation of a task force to improve promotion efforts.

Changes will affect travelers from all over the world, but the administration called out three countries for special treatment—Taiwan, which is being added to the visa waiver program; and China and Brazil, which will see changes to their visa application processes that should lead to better access. Not a bad idea, considering that both are fast-growing and lucrative markets. The U.S. Travel Association estimates that Chinese visitors’ average spend per trip is $6,243, and Brazilians’ is $4,940.

The White House’s outline of the program can be viewed here. Below are the action steps the President called for:

• Create a joint task force between the Secretaries of Commerce and the Interior to promote domestic and inbound travel. A focus will be placed on promoting national parks, wildlife refuges, cultural and historic sites, monuments and other public lands.
• Increase non-immigrant visa processing capacity in China and Brazil by 40 percent in 2012.
• Ensure that 80 percent of non-immigrant visa applicants are interviewed within three weeks of receipt of application.
• Add Taiwan to the visa waiver program, allowing Taiwanese nationals to visit the United States for tourism or business for up to 90 days with no visa. This would be the tenth country added since 2008. The recommendation to add Taiwan is pending Department of Homeland Security approval.
• Create a Department of Commerce website for travelers from key markets that culls visa-process information and statistics from across the federal government.
• Launch pilot program and rule change for visa processing in China and Brazil, with the goal of streamlining the non-immigrant visa process for certain applicants. Changes will include waiving interviews for very low-risk applicants, such as those replying for renewals and younger or older first-time applicants from Brazil.
• Expand the Global Entry Program to four more airports—Charlotte, Denver, Minneapolis and Phoenix. The Global Entry Program, created in 2008, expedites pre-approved, low-risk travelers from abroad. The administration estimates that this expansion will make the program active at airports that service 97 percent of arrivals to the United States.
• Appoint 32 private-sector executives to the U.S. Travel and Tourism Advisory Board. The full list can be viewed on the Department of Commerce website. Companies represented include Sabre Holdings, JetBlue Airways, Mall of America and Marriott International.

Photo: Official White House Photo by Sonya N. Hebert; Whitehouse.gov

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Where would you like to travel in 2012? For people in the travel industry, it’s often easier to come up with a list of where they wouldn’t like to travel. So many destinations, so little time.

This time of year, travel lists abound, with each, naturally, subjective in its own way. Looking for top luxury spots? Budget destinations? Off-the-beaten-path spots? How about top ethical places in the developing world? There’s a list for you.

Mayan ruins at Tulum, Mexico.

Without reading a single one, a destination gambler’s best odds for this year would be to include London and its surroundings, home of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. Not far behind should be locales in Mexico and Central America that were part of the Mayan world. That culture, after all, predicts that the world as we know it will transition into its next phase on December 21, 2012.

Many of the current 2012 travel lists do indeed mention one or both of these destinations/regions, namely CNN’s World’s Top Destinations for 2012 (the first four of which also include Chicago and Myanmar and happen to align with my personal list of where I’m likely heading this year) and Frommer’s Best Destinations for 2012.

The Frommer’s list is particularly interesting as it’s geared toward the hard-to-define traveler who simply loves to explore the world and runs the gamut from budget to luxury. Destination choices are all over the map, literally and figuratively, from Canada’s Bay of Fundy to Japan’s Fukuoka, Ghana to Girona, Spain, with Beirut, Curacao, Kansas City and Chongqing, China, rounding out the list.

Uptake’s own Yen Lee harnessed the social media power of Facebook’s friend graph to capture the most buzzed about places, based on more than 200 million comments, status updates, photo descriptions and check-ins. The list published on Huffington Post includes some classic Southeast Asian gems, including Hoi An, Vietnam, and Luang Prabang, Laos, along with Copacabana, Bolivia, and Portland, Oregon, stateside.

Lonely Planet has expanded its audience significantly beyond intrepid backpackers during the past decade, so its annual lists now seem to include more places that make one wonder “why there” as opposed to “where is there.” There remain, however, some great picks. For top U.S. destinations, LP editors recommend the always-enjoyable Chicago, the Four Corners region of the Southwest, California’s Gold Country and, perhaps more surprisingly than the other spots, Cincinnati. Ever hear of Culebra? No? It’s an island 17 miles off the coast of Puerto Rico. The Caribbean tropics can be yours, no passport required.

Luxury lovers who turn first to picks from Travel & Leisure‘s Hottest Destinations of 2012 will find a variety of remote resort destinations from which to choose, including Sri Lanka, Xishuangbanna in China’s Yunnan Province, and Mozambique’s Northern Coast, along with Bentonville, Arkansas. That’s right—Arkansas, which made the list thanks to the Moshe Safdie-designed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, opened in November.

Budget Travel magazine has a terrific list of value destinations, including Egypt—surely a bargain these days and desperately trying to rebuild its tourism industry; Atlantic Canada, which also appears on a variety of lists; and Taipei, a personal favorite, for its culinary scene and diverse topography. Stateside San Diego and San Antonio are the places to stretch your dollars.

Conscientious and green travelers can thank Ethical Traveler for its newly released list of the Developing Worlds 10 Best Ethical Destinations (press release), based on their accomplishments in the areas of environmental protection, social welfare, and human rights. The winners, in alphabetical order, are: Argentina, The Bahamas, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominica, Latvia, Mauritius, Palau, Serbia and Uruguay.

The editors at The New York Times haven’t yet published their list for 2012, but they recommended 41 places to go in 2011. That probably was inclusive enough to last most people a good few years, or even a decade.

Photo: D.M. Airoldi

About half a year after offering its loyalty program members the chance to earn rewards by checking in on Foursquare, Starwood Hotels and Resorts has launched a similar program through
Chinese location-based clone site Jiepang.com.

Starwood's St. Regis Lhasa

By linking their Jiepang accounts to their Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) accounts, travelers can earn bonus points for check-ins at more than 200 hotels in the Asia-Pacific region. Every month, Jiepang’s SPG Mayor, the person with the most check-ins, will earn special program perks and a moment in the spotlight in the form of an interview running on the SPG Jiepang landing page.

Jiepang, founded in 2010, has 1.4 million users, making it much smaller than its U.S.-based counterpart, Foursquare (more than 10 million) or Chinese microblog service Weibo (over 300 million).

Starwood’s partnership with this year-old Chinese social media start-up accompanies big development moves in the country. About a dozen Sheratons opened in China in 2011, and Starwood hopes to operate 100 properties there by the end of 2012. The Sheraton brand should account for about half of those, and Starwood and other Western hotel companies are turning their development focus from China’s biggest coastal cities to second- and third-tier inland locations.

The move also follows a recent trend toward more careful consideration of Chinese travelers beyond the Asia-Pacific region. This summer, “Starwood Personalized Travel” and “Hilton Huanying” were launched to better cater to the needs of Chinese guests at select hotels within the Starwood and Hilton families. Mandarin-speaking staff, tea kettles in the rooms and congee at the breakfast buffet are some of the amenities, standard at mainland hotels, now increasingly available in places like New York, London and Mexico City.

Photo: Starwood, St. Regis Lhasa

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