One of the thorns in the side of the American travel industry has been the difficulties international travelers face when trying to plan trips to the United States. For many, obtaining visas is an arduous task and this fact alone is preventing billions of dollars of economic output, says the U.S. Travel Association.

In a new report called "Ready for Takeoff: A Plan to Create 1.3 Million Jobs By Welcoming Millions of International Travelers," the USTA has compiled the impact the entry process has had on the U.S. economy and proposes a multi-step plan to fix it.

While boosting international travel to the U.S. clearly benefits a host of markets, such as tourism, it also has a tremendous impact on exports and, accordingly, the trade show industry.

Last year, says the USTA, international travel to the U.S. generated more than $134 billion in exports and supported 1.8 million jobs. By recapturing a 17 percent share of overseas travel, which the U.S. had in 2000, exports would jump by a cumulative $390 billion over ten years.

That 17 percent market share has become the recommended benchmark to regain for the country, which slipped away between 2000 and 2010, a "lost decade" for the U.S., says the USTA. That decade saw the world travel market grow by 60 million annual travelers, yet the U.S. last year brought in the same number of travelers it did in 2000.

Travel, says the USTA's report, is America's largest industry export sector and it's been hindered by self-imposed barriers of entry. The U.S. visa system, says the USTA, diverts millions of potential travelers to other countries that have more modest entry restrictions. The U.S. visa application process, for example, can take as long as 145 days in Brazil and 120 days in China, two of the fastest-growing markets for overseas travel.

The problems, says Geoff Freeman, the USTA's senior vice president, stem from perceptions around security and weak facilitation. Both, he says, are unfounded. "One hundred-day wait times are perceived as keeping America secure. We don't buy that. It's a lack of financial resources, efficiency and creative thinking."

Freeman says the State Department in recent years had made a handful of adjustments to minimize visa wait times in some countries which helped, but didn't last. "Resources were short and they couldn't maintain it. Wait times bounced back up after they took their foot off the pedal."

The State Department is part of the focus of the report, which says its resources must be better aligned with market demands—namely through technology and opening additional offices. The USTA suggests using video conferencing for visa interviews and making consular Web sites standardized and more user friendly. New offices, says the report, should be opened in countries with the highest demand: Brazil, China and India.

Further, wait times for visa should be reduced to 10 days or less, says the USTA. This, suggests the association, can be done through bolstering and more efficiently redeploying the corps of consular officers responsible for application processing; developing fast-tracking programs; and better analyzing the peaks and valleys of demand times.

From there, the USTA recommends better information collection, analysis and sharing. Importantly, the U.S. also needs to expand the visa waiver program to more countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Poland and Taiwan.