In 2012, the USA welcomed just under 30M visitors from overseas (countries other than Mexico and Canada), 77% of whom were from just 20 countries. A quarter of the overseas visitors were from Japan or the UK! In this post, I’ve mapped the ratio of leisure visitors to business visitors for each of these top 20 tourist-generating countries to determine whether people come to the USA for business or pleasure.

For each country, there are always more people visiting the USA for vacation or to see friends/family than there are people arriving for business or conferences. This calculation considers only nonimmigrant visitors, and does not include those visiting for other reasons, such as education.

The average global ratio of overseas travelers to the USA is 5.7 leisure visitors per business visitor. Within the top 20, four countries had ratios below four: China (3.1), India (3.1), Israel (3.8), and the Netherlands (3.9). Four countries had ratios above ten: Venezuela (13.6), Argentina (11.0), Dominican Republic (10.8), and Brazil (10.2).

Data source: http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2012-I-001/index.html