International visits to USA decline Fewer tourists translates to billions lost.
Drop translates to a loss of $4.6B spent in the U.S. economy
The number of international visitors to the USA has dipped precipitously in the past year, according to new figures by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the travel industry is mobilizing to reverse the trend.
A group of travel organizations has joined together to form the Visit U.S. Coalition to lobby the federal government to encourage international travel.
The groups include the U.S. Travel Association, the America Gaming Association and the American Hotel and Lodging Association.
In the first seven months of 2017, the USA had 41 million international visitors, a 4% decline from the same period in the previous year, according to the Commerce Department.
Research prepared for the Visit U.S. Coalition by the U.S. Travel Association shows that global travel volume increased 7.9% from 2015 to 2017. But the U.S. slice of that fell from 13.6% to 11.9% in the same period. That is the first drop after more than a decade of consistent growth.
Meanwhile, spending by international visitors to the USA dropped 3.3% through November 2017 over the same period the previous year, according to the Commerce Department.
The U.S. Travel Association estimates that translates into a loss of $4.6 billion spent in the U.S. economy and 40,000 jobs.
The new coalition is urging the federal government to support Brand USA, which was formed under the Obama administration to promote inbound international travel. They also called for faster processing of visas for foreign visitors and for increasing the number of Cus- toms and Border Protection officers.
Many tourism officials are also asking for an end to the political rhetoric by President Trump that they say is causing many travelers to choose destinations elsewhere. Trump has called for the building of a wall between Mexico and the United States and a travel ban on people from certain countries.
“All the messages the administration has put out in the world is the closure of markets, the closure of access to certain demographics,” says Fred Dixon, president and CEO of NYC & Co., the official tourism organization for New York City. “That is not the kind of message we want to be sending out to the world.”
According to the National Travel and Tourism Office, which works with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the steepest declines in inbound travelers have been from countries in the Middle East and Africa, two regions the Trump administration has targeted most in its goal to limit visas.
The Caribbean has also sent fewer tourists to the USA, perhaps a product of the devastation from hurricanes.
Data from July 2017 show that inbound travel from the Middle East is down 40.3%, from Africa 32.1%, from South America 15.5%, from Central America 18.8%, and from the Caribbean 22.3%. Even Eastern Europe had a 17.1% drop in visitors traveling to the USA.
“If you can’t come to the United States to buy products, you can certainly go to other markets because you have many options,” Dixon says. “The U.S. consumer is powerful, but the U.S. consumer is not powerful enough to drive the economy on its own.”
Hotels are seeing a decline in rooms being booked, says Gino Engels, cofounder of OTA Insight, a revenue management tool for hotels.
“In terms of availability, we see a lot more inventory unsold in places that would be busy,” he says.
Roger Dow, the president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, says the decrease in international travelers began in 2015, prior to Trump’s presidency. He attributes that to economic and political forces in Europe, the largest contingency of travelers to the USA.
“The U.S. consumer is not powerful enough to drive the economy on its own.” Fred Dixon President and CEO of NYC & Co., the official tourism organization for New York City