Before the pandemic, a steady stream of buses ferrying tourists from Brazil, China, Australia and elsewhere pulled into the Original Farmers Market every day. They typically idled for an hour or so, while their passengers ate and shopped for souvenirs at the historic collection of food stalls and kitschy shops in the heart of Los Angeles.

The buses still come these days. But, if the city's overall tourism figures are any indication, the number of international travelers isn't what it used to be.

Adam Burke is looking to fix that.

As president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board, Burke has watched the city rebound after the dark days of COVID-19 to reassert itself as one of the country's most popular travel destinations. The recovery, however, is incomplete as visits from international travelers remain well below pre-pandemic levels.

Boosting those visits, Burke says, is crucial to the overall strength of L.A.'s tourism industry, which brought in nearly $22 billion in 2022 and has more than 530,000 people working in tourism-related careers, according to city statistics. Foreign travelers tend to stay longer and spend more.

"It's impossible to overstate how critically important international visitation is to L.A.," Burke said, adding that the spending power of one international traveler is equal to three domestic visitors.

A pit stop at the farmers market is one of the many offerings that local officials, hotel executives and others from the L.A. tourism industry will be pitching to representatives from hundreds of international travel-related companies at an annual conference at L.A.'s convention center this week.

They're hoping the conference provides an additional boost to the number of visits from abroad. While the volume of domestic visitors to L.A. has recovered to pre-pandemic levels, the 5.8 million international visitors L.A. received last year represents only about three-quarters of the total who came in 2019, according to figures from the tourism board.

The conference marks the starting point of a broader campaign by the tourism board, which has plans to use money from a federal grant to bolster marketing and branding targeting international travelers.

The push to regain foreign visitors in Los Angeles is reflected in national tourism statistics. Before the pandemic hit, the amount that visitors to the U.S. spent in the country outpaced the total American travelers spent abroad, giving the country a so-called travel trade surplus. Beginning in the summer of 2021, however, that balance has shifted as international travel to the U.S. has slipped, according to the U.S. International Trade Administration.

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