New York's JFK Airport. Largest port of entry for international arrivals to US
Photo: AFP
The number of Israelis visiting the United States increased by 7% in 2014, figures released this week by the Office of Travel and Tourism Industries at the US Department of Commerce show.
The report puts Israel in the 22nd place among all countries whose residents visited the US, and in the 20th place if Canada and Mexico – which make up together some 55% of international arrivals to the US – are removed from the list.
According to the annual list of top inbound overseas markets, the number of arrivals from Israel to the US last year was 355,466 compared to 331,359 in 2013.
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The figures were published on Sunday in honor of the 2015 International Pow Wow (IPW) tourism conference, which opened over the weekend in Orlando, Florida and attracts more than 10,000 representatives of the US tourism industry and representatives of tourism and aviation industries overseas which operate vis-à-vis the American market.
The report further shows that the US welcomed nearly 75 million international visitors in 2014, five million more than the year before – a 7% increase over 2013. In addition, the number of tourists entering the US has grown by some 50% since 2006, while the number of Israeli visitors increased by some 25% over this period.
Additional figures reveal that 13.7% of international visitors arriving in the US are businesspeople, while the rest arrive for vacation purposes.
The John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport in New York remains the largest port of entry for international arrivals to the US with more than 34 million tourists, followed by Miami's airport (5.5 million arrivals), Los Angeles, Honolulu, Newark in New Jersey, San Francisco, Chicago and Orlando.