Web site informs foreigners about U.S.

The Department of Commerce estimates that in 2007, 56.7 million foreign visitors spent $122 billion on travel to and inside the United States, $18 billion more than we spent going abroad.

Yet our government does very little to encourage this positive trade surplus. Unlike many other countries, the United States has no national tourism office to encourage foreign travelers to pay us a visit, although a bill to change that has been making its way through Congress. A hodge-podge of state and other tourism entities maintain some foreign presence and conduct sporadic promotions, but considering the potential, relatively little attention is directed to informing foreign travelers about what we have to offer.

A decade ago, Mike Leco, a Pittsburgh native, entrepreneur and inveterate traveler, set out to address this void.

Having lived in Europe and participated in one of the earliest electronic travel forums for foreigners interested in visiting the United States, the Peters resident established USATourist.com, a Web site written specifically to provide information about visiting this country for foreign travelers in their own language.

He started writing information profiles of various popular U.S. tourism destinations with which he was familiar. By steadily adding to that collection and enlisting other writers, Mr. Leco grew the site to include profiles of more than 100 states and cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico, as well as a selection of national and state parks. In addition to maps and a host of practical tips and travel information on shopping and clothing chart conversions, its more than 2200 pages of original content offer suggested driving tours and provides various forums where visitors can post questions.

Most important, USATourist provides translations in Spanish, German, French and Japanese in addition to English. "That's one of our key distinctions," Mr. Leco explained recently, "We keep things simple and write with a foreign audience in mind."

The company, which has never promoted or advertised itself, generates revenue through a combination of commissions, click-through ads and display ads pegged to particular destinations. This slow steady approach has become a successful formula. USATourist, now averages 500,000 unique visitors each month with more than a million page views, making it the country's top Web site dedicated to foreign travelers.

"The vast majority of those visits come from abroad," he noted. "In fact, our Spanish pages often get more traffic than our English pages, as more and more people from Mexico, Central and Latin America are visiting Miami and Florida. It's a market that can only grow."