DiscoverAmerica.com is celebrating its first year as the Official Travel and Tourism Website of the United States by announcing a slate of content upgrades, site enhancements and money-saving deals to help travellers plan trips to the USA.

Sixty-five destinations are featured on DiscoverAmerica.com in addition to information on all 50 states and the five U.S. territories, along with entry requirements from official U.S. sources. The site also includes expanded trip-planning content to help travellers learn more about the variety of experiences and activities available to British visitors.

“Before you visit the United States, you should go to DiscoverAmerica.com,” said Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association. “This dynamic website is evolving with new offerings and has filled a much needed gap to welcome and inform international visitors about the United States during a challenging period for long-haul travel.”

The site features many leading in-market U.S. travel specialists, such as Thomson, British Airways Holidays, Virgin Holidays, Titan HiTours and America As You Like It, offering users special deals on travel packages to the United States.

Traffic to the site and time spent viewing its content has been very favourable in its first year. Daily site traffic increased 254 percent overall since last summer’s initial launch period. Users have spent more than three million minutes researching U.S. trips and have viewed four million pages of travel content.

Unique features of the website include the Activity Finder, which houses information on more than 2,600 activities in 24 popular trip categories, such as art galleries and museums, shopping, food and wine, and beaches and coasts. The Interactive Map tool located on the Places page helps users identify approximate distances between U.S. locales.

Created one year ago under a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Travel Association and the U.S. Department of Commerce-Office of Travel and Tourism Industries, DiscoverAmerica.com is actually a suite of international sites designed for travellers from Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Japan and Germany, the top five markets representing about 75 percent of all inbound visitation to the United States.

Strategic content partners on DiscoverAmerica.com include official sources such as state tourism offices, convention and visitors bureaus, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, American Express, Fodor’s, Google Maps and Weather.com.