Department of Commerce officials said 77 million international visitors spent a record-setting $251.4 billion experiencing America last year, representing a 2 percent increase over 2016.
The Department’s International Trade Administration’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) compiled the data, which also noted travel and tourism exports helped support more than 1.2 million American jobs across the country.
“International travelers continue to set spending records visiting the United States, and I expect that trend to continue in 2018 spawning further job growth,” Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said. “The American tourism industry, which generated a trade surplus of more than $77.4 billion last year, continues to help drive our economy to new heights.”
The report referenced personal travel spending included leisure, education, and health-related travel, as well as passenger air transportation, increased 3.1 percent and 3.4 percent, respectively.
The increases offset the decline in business travel, officials said, which has been decreasing since 2014. Education-related travel, in and of itself, accounted for nearly two-thirds of the increase in personal travel.
In April officials said the NTTO temporarily suspended publication of overseas arrivals data due to anomalies in records received from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – noting both entities identified 4.5 million records misclassified concerning residency, due to a programming error.
Residency is not used by CBP in adjudicating admissibility, and the misclassification had not been identified until it became apparent records were not reflecting trends consistent with other indicators of overseas travel to the United States.