OVERVIEW

The U.S. travel community includes airlines, bus and rental car companies, cruise lines, hotels, state and local destination organizations, attractions and other diverse travel and tourism-related businesses and associations that both impact and are impacted by climate change. As a result, the travel community as a whole and its sectors individually are committed to taking actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and explore mitigation measures needed to address climate change impacts.

U.S. TRAVEL POSITION

Employing more than 7 million Americans, the travel community has already embraced “green” policies and is in the process of creating thousands of additional green jobs.  U.S. Travel believes that the development of environmental policies and regulations must be crafted in ways that ensure significant new costs to the travel community are minimized and imposed as uniformly as possible. Because travel and tourism is the United States’ largest service export and one that maintains a trade surplus, the economy would suffer if the industry were subject to significantly higher energy and transportation costs than corresponding business sectors in the developing world.