Passport secrets revealed

“The timing of 2008 simply doesn’t work,” retorts Rick Webster, vice president of government affairs for the Travel Industry Association. “We have done little or nothing as a government or nation to inform travelers of this requirement as it relates to land and sea.

“WHTI is necessary, and we support it,” he says, “but it has to be implemented correctly and at the right time. We screw this up at the border and there will be repercussions.”

“WHTI has left the perception with people that it’s difficult to cross the border,” says Arlene White, executive director of the Binational Tourism Alliance, which has offices in the Niagara Falls area where a lot of crossings take place. Other factors come into play, including skyrocketing gas prices and parity in the U.S. and Canadian dollar exchange rate. Both make travel to Canada less attractive than in the past, and confusion surrounding the passport issue only compounds the situation.

“You hear people interviewed basically say, ‘I’m not going to buy a passport just to cross the border. I’ll just go other places,’” White says.

Greg Hermus, associate director of the Conference Board of Canada/Canadian Tourism Research Institute, says that while individual business travelers have or will obtain passports, businesses as a whole may be reluctant to book international conventions.

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“There’s a hesitation to set up large meetings outside of the United States if most of your membership is American and you are not sure all your members have passports,” he says.

U.S. citizens have been “deterred and confused” by questions surrounding what documents they need to travel to Canada, says Chris Jones, vice president of public affairs for the Tourism Industry Association of Canada. “I think there’s also a little bit of skepticism toward having a national government-authenticated ID document when people have been used to crossing the border with a driver’s license,” he says. “We want the DHS and Congress to accept the idea of an enhanced driver’s license. We think that ultimately would be a preferred solution.”

Jones says he joined the Business for Economic and Secure Trade and Tourism in lobbying legislators in late September for such a WHTI-compliant driver’s license — a year after an initial lobbying effort. “It was a very different atmosphere this time,” he says. “It had been lukewarm about a year ago. Now there's been a significant change in receptiveness.”

DHS has proposed the REAL ID, an enhanced driver’s license/identification card that incorporates security features into the application process and the card itself. But when that option will be available is up in the air.

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“We expect to announce a final ruling sometime in the near future,” is the most Nur Valdes will say.

Meanwhile, the Travel Industry Association is optimistic that legislators will get the extension they seek to June 2009.

“I don’t think one date change [in the spending bills] will trigger a veto,” Webster says. “There are much bigger fish to fry.”

Or maybe, he adds, they’ll end up with a compromise. “Maybe it will be delayed, but not as late as June 2009. This is politics, and anything is possible.”

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