11 JUN 2018:  How many visitors are really heading to the United States? Answer: Unknown. The US National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) has suspended data releases on overseas arrivals “pending resolution of underlying technical issues with a significant number of records received from US Customs and Borders Protection.”

A statement from the NTTO, which is part of the International Trade Administration, added that no new numbers would be issued beyond a preliminary report that was released March 7.

The anomaly casts into doubt arrivals numbers from past years as well, US Department of Commerce deputy director of industry relations Julie Heizer told Travel Industry Today at the recent IPW travel trade show in Denver. She added that the reporting “hiatus” is expected to be resolved by the end of this year.

The issue stems from how some arrivals to the US have been “identified, categorized and counted,” with the NTTO admitting that is has “detected meaningful and increasing number of non-US citizens travelling on visas to the United States categorized as US residents.”

The result, says the NTTO, is a “probable undercount,” meaning the number of visitors travelling to the US for business, leisure and education and staying one night or more should rise, helping somewhat mitigate a significant decline in visitations in 2017 – with a decrease of 7.2 percent in overseas arrivals and -3.5 percent overall reported in the first three quarters of the year. (Canada, which is not counted in the overseas numbers, increased four percent).

The news is obviously welcome to a US tourism industry that has suffered from negative publicity and perception abroad due to the controversial policies of the current Trump administration. However, beyond the feel-good factor, the data is integral to analysis conducted by the US Bureau of Economics as well as destinations and private sector companies in formulating tourism strategies.

A few years ago, for example, Mark Brown of the US Department of Commerce memorably used NTTO figures to temper enthusiasm for the perceived bonanza of a sudden surge in Chinese outbound tourism by pointing out to attendees at Discover America gathering in Toronto that more Canadians visited Iowa in a year than Chinese visited the entire US at the time.

In other words, spending marketing dollars on Canada, not China, would be more advantageous, he implied, because the numbers – when verified – don’t lie.