Spending on travel and tourism fell slightly last quarter after taking a nosedive earlier in the year — an encouraging sign for the battered industry.

Travel and tourism spending dropped at a 1.4% annual rate in the second quarter of 2009 from the first quarter, following an 8.9% decline in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said Wednesday.

“People are starting to think about traveling again” said Christopher Pike, the principal of the travel and tourism group at IHS Global Insight. But “the unemployment rate still increasing and the businesses still not showing the corporate profits are going to mean that both leisure and business travel are going to take another quarter or two to really start to rebound.”

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