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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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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For the next five weeks, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., will not be a White Plains, New York-based company, or even a U.S. company. Well, sort of.

Sheraton Great Wall

Starwood’s entire top management team, including President & CEO Frits van Paasschen, will be headquartered in Shanghai, China, from June 8 to July 11, 2011.

“Today, we’re a global company that happens to be based in New York,” said van Paasschen. “China’s spectacular transformation is hard to grasp unless experienced firsthand—it’s the proverbial, ‘you can’t really understand a culture until you buy groceries there.’”

Starwood has 70 hotels in China with a pipeline of more than 90 new hotels. They’ll be opening a new hotel in China once every two weeks this year.

It’s not just Starwood either. A couple of months ago in March,  InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) held its board and executive committee meetings in China.

IHG has 150 hotels open in China and another 150 in the pipeline for the next five years. It currently has 52,000 employees in China, with plans to hire an additional 90,000 in the next three to five years. To fulfill this demand, IHG has established 25 “partner academies” in China, which produce thousands of graduates ready to enter the hospitality industry.

The global travel industry’s focus in China has also reversed from offering services for visiting foreigners to locking in Chinese travelers.

“Today, more than 50 percent of our guests in China are Chinese,” says Simon Turner, president of global development for Starwood. “When they travel abroad, the Chinese will stay with the hotel brands they know from home, which underscores the significance of our growing footprint of flagship hotels in China and its halo effect on Starwood’s hotels around the world.”

Marriott International recently signed a distribution agreement with Ctrip, the Chinese travel industry’s 800-pound gorilla. The agreement allows Chinese travelers to book any of Marriott’s 3,500 hotels worldwide.

IHG is going one step further and developing a new upscale, China-centric hotel brand from scratch for the Chinese market. IHG Chairman David Webster says Chinese travelers will grow up with it, helping nurture the same trust and comfort experienced by foreigners when they see a familiar brand like InterContinental upon arrival in China.

This kind of long-term thinking and the massive investments made for the 2008 Olympics and Shanghai World Expo has lead to an overheated hotel industry in China. But it still sounds like a good investment, given the statistics:

- 1.9 billion domestic tourist trips in 2010, and growing fast in 2011 and beyond.
- world’s largest inbound tourist destination by 2015, with an estimated 183 million overnight stays.
- 100 million outbound travelers by 2015.

So far, Steve Wynn is the only U.S. hospitality executive who has publicly and seriously considered moving his company, Wynn Resorts, permanently from Las Vegas to China, because 65 percent of Wynn’s revenue now comes from Macau. But as the Asian markets outstrip local operations in the United States and Europe, enjoying extended Chinese hospitality is an idea that’s going to be considered seriously by a lot of people.

Photo – star5112

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Last Sunday, China banned smoking in most public spaces, including airports, train stations, restaurants—and hotels. Basically, any enclosed public space where people congregate (though offices and factories are oddly exempt), it’s now illegal to light up. The country has about 300 million smokers, and, according to the World Health Organization, more than a million die each year from smoking-related diseases.

Still, the impact of the new law is not expected to be dramatic, given that the government doesn’t plan to penalize violators. According to The Telegraph, the genesis of the ban is the World Health Organization’s reprimand of China for refusing to comply with a global anti-tobacco treaty. There is also broad concern for non-smokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke on a daily basis.

The hotel industry in general is downplaying the news. Almost all hotel properties in major cities offer non-smoking rooms, and many have long restricted lighting up to outdoor or ventilated areas, as smoking in rooms increases cleaning and maintenance costs.

Carlos Chen, director of sales at the Guoman Hotel in Shanghai, says most of his guests are accustomed to the rule. “Even our smoking guests frequently travel to countries where smoking has been banned in public places for several years,” says Chen. “I don’t think the new law in China will impact our business very much.”

Major hotel properties in Thailand, Singapore and Mumbai are implementing smoking bans in anticipation of more restrictive laws in the coming months.

Photo: Ivan Walsh, via Flickr