Mickey Mouse has a bone to pick with Uncle Sam.

Some U.S. travel executives — including those who run Disneyland and Walt Disney World — think the government needs to do more to improve the country’s image with foreign tourists, who increasingly are choosing other places for their vacations.

Tourism officials ascribe the decline partly to anti-Americanism that arose after the country launched military action in Afghanistan and Iraq and to the “hassle factor” associated with new visa application and airport security procedures.

Aggressive campaigns by other countries to lure tourists have had an effect, too.

“It’s more than just an image decline,” said Jay Rasulo, president of Walt Disney Parks & Resorts, a Lake Buena Vista, Fla.-based unit of The Walt Disney Co. “I think other countries are out there competing for tourists and we have not been.”

Rasulo and other travel executives say tourism to the United States, while rising again after several down years, is not as robust as it should be, with an estimated 10 percent fewer international visitors in 2004 than in 2000. Although the weak dollar has brought more visitors in recent months, the overall trend remains disappointing for the industry.

The stakes involved are huge. Visitors from abroad accounted for about $93.5 billion in spending and economic activity in the United States in 2004, according to Commerce Department estimates. That’s slightly larger than U.S. exports of automobiles, engines and parts.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy said the new procedures were intended to correct vulnerabilities exploited by the Sept. 11 terrorists, without impeding trade or travel.

“We can’t allow our system to be abused again,” he said. “Because the system was not enforced rigorously in the past, any change to enforcement postures become significant changes in the minds of people who used it before.”

Tourism officials emphasize that they aren’t opposed to the Bush administration’s homeland security objectives; what concerns them is the manner in which policies are implemented.

A woman traveling from South America watches as her data comes up on a computer screen after she was fingerprinted and photographed last year at Miami International Airport. U.S. travel executives say the U.S. war on terror is unintentionally scaring off foreign tourists.

“We have developed an image in many countries as ‘Fortress America,’ ” said Betsy O’Rourke, senior vice president for marketing at the Travel Industry Association of America, a Washington-based trade group.

Tourists should be greeted as “customers,” O’Rourke said, and not as potential “invaders.”

Alan Chick of Brighton, England, has traveled to the United States once a year, on average, for the past 18 years. And while there is some truth to the perceived hassle factor, he said, the problem has been vastly overblown and shouldn’t deter foreign tourists.

“Unfortunately, the Americans don’t do very much to dispel these things,” Chick said. “They don’t really do anything to say ‘Hey, it’s really not that bad.’ “

The commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks said the nation’s beefed-up border screening system needed to become more efficient and friendly, and it noted that visa applications in 2003 were down 32 percent compared with 2001.

“There is evidence that the present system is disrupting travel to the United States,” the commission said.

Meanwhile, a November poll of 8,000 consumers from eight industrialized nations found that 55 percent of respondents had an increasingly negative perception of the United States, according to GMI Inc., a Seattle-based market research firm.

That rankles some travel officials.

“I refuse to believe that our declining image is a fair portrayal of who we really are,” said Barbara Richardson, an Amtrak vice president, during an industry luncheon last month in Washington.

The image problem aside, the U.S. tourism industry already is losing global market share as borders in many parts of the world have become easier and cheaper to cross, and as countries from Spain to Singapore outspend the United States in tourism marketing and advertising.

“I don’t know if it’s naivete or arrogance that we feel people know the U.S. so well that we don’t need to invite them,” said Marilyn Carlson Nelson, CEO of Carlson Companies Inc., a Minnetonka, Minn.-based owner of travel agencies, hotels and restaurants.

Either way, Nelson said, it is critical for the U.S. government to market its national parks and other attractions more forcefully, lest it concede more tourism business to other countries and allow “the perception that foreigners might not be welcome” to fester.

Thirty-nine state governments spent about $20 million in 2003 on international advertising and other promotions, according to a nationwide survey. This was down 11 percent from the year before, but still more than twice as much as the federal government has allocated for 2005.