Travel industry awaits eventual slowdown
The travel industry is voicing a common refrain: President Donald Trump’s travel ban, terror attacks in Europe and a laptop ban represent a recipe for a potential sharp decline in visitors to and from the U.S.
“When you hear words like ‘travel ban,’ it puts a big chill” on travel and tourism, James J. Murren, chairman and chief executive of MGM Resorts, said at an industry conference last week in New York.
Some data is backing up those concerns. Nearly 20 percent fewer people are visiting this summer from the Middle East, the focus of Trump’s travel ban, even though the policy has been blocked by U.S. courts. As of early June, overall advance airline bookings to the United States were down 3.4 percent for this year’s summer travel season compared with the same time last year, according to ForwardKeys, a Spanish company that tracks air travel.
And NYC & Co., New York City’s tourism marketing agency, said in early June that it expected a 2.4 percent decline this year in international visitors to the city, the top tourist destination for people visiting the United States.
But so far, the worst fears have not been realized.
In June, the U.S. Travel Association predicted only a slight fall in the number of people visiting the United States this year. The number of international passengers at airports serving Orlando, Florida, San Francisco and Las Vegas, three of the country’s top tourism hubs, rose in the early part of 2017. And travelers from North America using Heathrow Airport in London, as well as Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports in Paris, were also up, according to traffic counts from those airports.
Investors do not seem spooked, either. Shares in Wyndham Worldwide, the hotel company, are near their highest ever, as are shares of Marriott International, which merged last year with Starwood Hotels. A Bloomberg index of stocks for airlines based in the U.S. has risen 6.5 percent since the start of the year. Shares in United Airlines, which faced major public relations problems after the rough treatment of a passenger in April, are up 6.3 percent since the start of 2017.
J. Scott Kirby, president of United Airlines, was asked at a recent conference if the terrorist attacks in Britain had had any impact on demand for flights to that country. The short answer, he said, was no. “They’re terrible, that these events happen,” Kirby said. “And in a way, even worse is that they’re happening with such regularity that there isn’t much impact, that people are almost becoming numb, perhaps.”