The Tourist Tide Changes

A first: more overseas visitors than outbound Americans

"We're having one of our best summer seasons ever, but it is kind of weird. Maybe 25% of our tourists are not just from out of town, they're from out of the country."

So says Russell Rosen, manager of the Best Western Buccaneer Inn resort motel in Naples, Fla., by way of describing the biggest change in tourist travel patterns since Americans began flocking to the then inexpensive delights of Europe in the postwar years. From the manicured streets of Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., to the beaches of Nantucket and Cape Cod, the U.S. is playing host this summer to an army of overseas visitors that is expected to rise 19% above the 1979 level to a record 8.2 million people. While the ranks of such visitors have nearly doubled in the past five years, 1980 will go down in the travel industry books as the first in which the number of outlanders touring the U.S. exceeded the number of Americans going abroad. This year only about 8 million Americans will do so, down 3% from 1979.

Leading the parade of overseas visitors to the U.S. are Britons, whose numbers are expected to increase 30% this year to 1.3 million; the British have benefited in the past 18 months from a 20% jump in the value of sterling compared with the dollar, largely as a result of their mounting North Sea oil bonanza. Not far behind are the Japanese, some 1.2 million of whom are expected to visit the U.S. during the year, followed by the Germans (675,000), the Venezuelans (490,000) and the French (400,000).

The more than $5.5 billion that overseas visitors are expected to spend in the U.S. will ripple through the economy and generate some $17 billion more in economic activity. In addition, the receipts will help bolster the U.S.'s sagging financial accounts. In 1979 American travelers spent nearly $1 billion more overseas than the foreigners spent in the U.S., but this year the deficit is expected to narrow to only $200 million. That should help ease pressure, at least modestly, on the dollar.

Without the growth in foreign visitors, the U.S.'s $140 billion travel and tourism industry would be in worse shape than it already is. As unemployment has ticked upward and inflation has put a tighter and tighter squeeze on family budgets, more and more Americans have either been staying home or going on cheaper vacations. Though even a week at the seashore now seems expensive to many Americans, Europeans are eager to take advantage of what appear to them to be fire-sale prices. While persistent high inflation is a relatively recent problem for the U.S., a number of European nations have wrestled with it for years, and their own prices have climbed to alpine heights. The late 1970s slide of the dollar against such key currencies as the West German mark, the Swiss franc, and the British pound has only widened the price gap. In Munich, a cup of coffee now sells for the dollar equivalent of $1.50; designer jeans in London go for $65 or more a pair; gasoline costs $3.23 per gal. in Denmark.

The cost of food in the U.S. is proving pleasantly surprising to visitors. Observes O/ystein Lie, 38, a Scandinavian businessman who spent June in the U.S. with his wife and two sons: "The prices were much lower than I had expected. Taking the family out to lunch costs half of what it does at home."

Many visitors are coming because, with the U.S. now affordable, they are curious to confront its vastness, complexity and excitement for themselves. To prepare U.S.-bound Frenchmen for the experience, French television and the press have in recent weeks sprouted a whole new generation of latter-day Tocquevilles seeking to explain American life. One hot-selling guidebook advises U.S.-bound Frenchmen to make sure to call the natives by their first names (Americans "ridicule anyone who does not act like everyone else"), and be brave and eat American food.

Like the U.S. youngsters who have been flooding Europe in backpacks and jeans since the late 1960s, a substantial number of the foreigners coming to the U.S. are young, first-time visitors seeking to link up to the nation's cultural roots. Sometimes they find them in the oddest places. Anne Fangberget, 25, of Oslo, was so moved by a familiar cliche of Hollywood films, in which the free-spirit hero is shown driving across the Golden Gate Bridge with the radio blaring, that she went to California, rented a car, and repeated the experience for herself. Reports she: "The car stereo was on full volume with that California-sound music coming out. That was really a great moment."

Europe's own travel industry is suffering this year, as a result of a sluggish economy, a stretch of the worst weather in a generation--and the chilling effect of persistent terrorist activity in Italy, Corsica and Spain. For a while, some villas along Spain's normally choked Costa Blanca had been going unrented, and hotel rooms have been readily available. French travel agents report a 20% decline in vacation bookings compared with those in 1979. Even more shocking, in their view, are projections that nearly 25% of all the vacation money Frenchmen will spend this year will be spent in--zut alors! --the U.S.

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