Tourism in the United States
Employment In the United States, tourism is a large industry that serves millions of international and domestic tourists yearly.
As of 2018, New York City is the most visited destination in the United States, followed by Los Angeles, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Chicago.
[clarification needed] Package tours did not exist until the 1870s and 1880s, when entrepreneurs of various sorts from hotel keepers and agents for railroad lines to artists and writers recognized the profit to be gained from the prospering tourism industry.
[6] Yosemite Park was developed as a tourist attraction in the late 1850s and early 1860s for an audience who wanted a national icon and place to symbolize exotic wonder of its region.
[4] Photography played an important role for the first time in the development of tourist attractions, making it possible to distribute hundreds of images showing various places of interest.
[9] Some tourists were fascinated by the rapid growth of the new urban areas: "It is an absorbing thing to watch the process of world-making; both the formation of the natural and the conventional world," wrote English writer Harriet Martineau in 1837.
The English writer and actress Fanny Kemble, an admirer of the American prison system, was also concerned that nature was being destroyed in favor of new developments.
[12] Accounts of these visits written by Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, Lydia Sigourney and Caroline Gilman were published in magazines and travel books.
[12] Sigourney's Scenes in My Native Land (1845) included descriptions of her tour of Niagara Falls and other places of scenic interest with accounts of her visits to prisons and asylums.
[7] Urban tourism became a profitable industry in 1915 as the number of tour agencies, railroad passenger departments, guidebook publishers and travel writers grew at a fast pace.
[18] Florida's white sandy beaches, warm winter temperatures and wide range of activities such as swimming, fishing, boating and hiking all attracted tourists to the state.
[21] This was also helped by the establishment of the Interstate Highway System as well as the reliance of automobiles of which Americans saw cars as their new personal found freedom and enjoyment.
Air travel changed everything from family vacations to Major League Baseball, as had steam-powered trains in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The World Tourism Organisation (WTO, 1998) recorded that, in 1950, arrivals of tourists from abroad, excluding same-day visits, numbered about 25.2 million.
[22] It was also during the late 20th century that individual states began to adopt their own tourism slogans, with the aim to increase both domestic and international visitors.
[26] The U.S. outbound holiday market is sensitive in the short term, but possibly one of the most surprising results from the September 11, 2001 attacks was that by February 2002 it had bounced back.
[27] The United States economy began to slow significantly in 2007, mostly because of a real-estate slump, gas prices and related financial problems.
[30] There exist a broad range of tourist attractions in the United States such as amusement parks, festivals, gambling, golf courses, historical buildings and landmarks, hotels, museums, galleries, outdoor recreation, spas, restaurants and sports.
[32][33] The highest numbers of non-immigrant admissions into the United States for tourists and for business purposes in were from the following countries:[34] Statistics include territories, as follows.
