RIYADH, 3 July — US Ambassador Robert Jordan said here yesterday that his country’s new security regulations are global in their scope and not targeted at any particular region or nationality.

The ambassador said Saudis are welcome to visit the US for business, holiday or education. According to him, some 85,000 Saudis visited the US last year. This represented a fall of 10 percent in terms of business travel and 40 percent in family travel.

Ambassador Jordan was speaking at a press conference after launching the Visit USA Committee’s new website at www.go-2-usa.com. No Saudi journalist was present at the event, which was also attended by John Burgess, counselor for Press and Cultural Affairs; Jacquie Wathen, commercial specialist; and representatives of travel agencies.

Both the ambassador and Burgess narrated their own experience of security checks at US airports despite their diplomatic status. They were responding to a question from Arab News on the new regulation that requires the passenger’s suitcase to remain unlocked all the way from an American airport to the port of disembarkation.

The ambassador said the effort to make security foolproof is symbolized by the adage that "perfection is the enemy of the good" and that there is a price to be paid for safety. Asked about the drop in the tourist traffic on the Saudi-US sector, Burgess said that besides the decline in individual and family travel, the number of students pursuing higher studies in the US had also fallen by two percent to reach 28,000 students this year. Request for US visas was also down by two percent.

As for the average spending by the Saudi tourist, it was disclosed that a Saudi family of two adults and two children spent $ 500-700 per day. The average length of their vacation was 35 days.

Travel agents present on the occasion attributed the downtrend, among other things, to fears over the general economic recession.

Speaking on behalf of the Visit USA Committee, Tariq M. Jaffrey, the committee’s chairman, said Saudi Arabian Airlines had halted two flights to Orlando following the drop in tourist traffic to that state. Another travel agent from the Al Tayyar Group said the consumers’ shopping capacity had also declined by 10 to 25 percent as a result of the global economic recession.

Even so, there was no change on the medical front and people continued to go abroad for treatment. Jaffrey said Saudi tourists would be encouraged to write about their experience at the website, be it positive or negative. Such feedback would provide input into what needs to be done to rectify the shortcomings.

R.K. Praveen, senior manager of Tamak’s IT & Communication Division, said the website, currently available only in English, would eventually have 1,000 pages of text in a multimedia environment.

Its Arabic version will go live after a month. It has been developed by Tamak, a Saudi company specialized in IT and communications.