International travelers concerned about President Donald Trump’s trade policies and bellicose rhetoric have been canceling trips to the United States, depriving the US tourism industry of billions of dollars at a time when the economy has started to appear wobbly.
Canadians are skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals. Europeans are eschewing US national parks, and Chinese travelers are vacationing in Australia instead.
International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5 percent this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originally forecast a 9 percent increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last month to reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”
“There’s been a dramatic shift in our outlook,” said Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics. “You’re looking at a much weaker economic engine than what otherwise would’ve been, not just because of tariffs, but the rhetoric and condescending tone around it.”
The number of overseas visitors to the United States fell 2.4 percent in February from a year earlier, government data shows, with the biggest drops in travelers from Africa (down 9 percent), Asia (7 percent) and Central America (6 percent). Meanwhile, travel from China — a frequent target of the president’s ire — is down 11 percent.
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Penelope Poole, who lives in the Philippines, is scrapping plans for a family cruise in Florida with her 90-year-old mother. Instead, she and nearly 30 relatives are heading to a lakeside resort in Canada.
“My siblings and I decided that given the early volatility and hostility of this administration, we couldn’t take a chance,” the 66-year-old said, adding that some relatives would be traveling from Indonesia and Mexico. “We were increasingly concerned about personal safety.”
This moment isn’t without precedent. Sacks notes that international tourism slowed sharply during the first Trump presidency, amounting to roughly $20 billion in unrealized revenue, even before covid-related disruptions. Back then, it was tourists from Mexico, China and the Middle East who were pulling back, deterred by the administration’s travel bans, tariffs and tough talk on immigration.
This time, Canada — the top source of international travel to the United States — is poised to lead the way. Trump has for weeks said he wants to make the country a “51st state.” In response, Canada’s former prime minister, Justin Trudeau, urged Canadians not to vacation in the United States.
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They appear to have listened: The number of Canadians driving back from visits to the United States fell by 23 percent in February, while air travel from the United States was down 13 percent compared with a year earlier, according to government figures from Statistics Canada.
Altogether, Tourism Economics expects a 15 percent decline in travel from Canada this year, translating to $3.3 billion in lost spending.
Bertha Lopez, who is from Mexico and lives near Toronto, used to cross the US border every few weeks to buy staples like butter and cheese. This year, she’s stopped all of that — and vows not to set foot in the United States for at least a few years. She recently canceled a trip to Arizona to visit a longtime friend whose husband is ill; instead, she’s buying her friend a ticket to visit her in Canada this summer.
“All of this talk of making Canada the 51st state has been upsetting. It’s just incredibly offensive,” the 54-year-old said. “So I’m doing what I can: No more Tide. No more Coca-Cola. No more Disney. And barring a funeral or someone in the hospital, I am not going to the United States.”
Canada’s retreat comes at a tough time for the US tourism industry, which is facing pressures of its own at home. US airlines last week warned that demand is slowing, with Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines all revising down their forecasts for the first three months of the year. Government and business travel are waning, and hotel and travel company executives say Americans — especially those with lower incomes — are cutting back on vacations because of economic uncertainty.
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“People are cautious and they’re pulling back a little bit on travel,” Delta CEO Edward Herman Bastian said in a presentation on Tuesday. Travelers, he said, are “kind of waiting to see what’s going to transpire, whether it’s trade and tariff challenges or macroeconomic policy changes.”
Notably, the hospitality and leisure industry has posted two months of job losses at a time when the broader labor market is growing.
At the Vacationeer, a Disney-focused travel agency in Florida that works almost exclusively with domestic travelers, bookings are up more than 5 percent from a year ago. But owner Jonathan de Araujo is nervous about whether people will stick to their plans — many plunk down $200 deposits on their credit cards, thinking they’ll make a final decision down the line. And with the stock market’s recent slide and increased recession worries, he says he won’t be surprised if a “big cancellation wave” is around the corner.
“When there’s trouble in the economy, the first thing people cut is their travel budget,” he said. “They wait until it’s time to pay in full, and they say, ‘Actually I can’t afford this.’ That’s what I’m worried about.”
Economic red flags have been piling up in recent weeks. New tariffs are reigniting concerns about price increases, and policy uncertainties from Trump and Elon Musk’s US DOGE Service have made it tougher for businesses and households to plan for the future. Americans soured on the economy for the third straight month in March, with consumer sentiment declining to the lowest level in more than two years. And although CEOs are feeling better about their prospects than they have in years, small businesses are starting to report worries about economic uncertainty. Financial markets have been jittery, too, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average posting its worst week in two years.
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Consumer spending, which makes up about 70 percent of the US economy, has been driving much of the country’s recent growth, but some of the country’s largest retailers, including Walmart and Target, have recently said they expect Americans to pull back in the coming months.
“The fog is just too thick — we can handle bad news, but consumers can’t handle uncertainty, and that’s what we have,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who says there’s a 35 percent chance of a recession this year, up from 15 percent a couple of weeks ago. “Things have gotten very serious, very quickly.”
That’s also the case overseas, as Europeans and others face pointed attacks from the White House. Trump last week threatened a 200 percent tariff on European wine and alcohol after calling the European Union “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World.”
Travel from Western Europe, which made up more than one-third of overseas travel last year, could be hard-hit by those comments. Tariffs on Europe and the Trump administration’s new friendliness toward Russia could also hurt tourism from Europe, researchers at Tourism Economics wrote in a recent report.
Jens Muellers and his father were preparing to travel to Seattle from Germany this summer for a road trip through Olympic, Mount Rainier and Glacier national parks. But after the administration’s attacks on Europeans and its efforts to downsize the national parks system, Muellers said they changed their plans. They are heading to Canada.
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“It’s a real shame and breaking my heart to see what is happening with the national parks and [its] employees right now,” the 31-year-old said, adding that it would have been his fifth trip to the United States. “We won’t come back to the US until things change significantly.”