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US International Tourism Market Share Is Falling Under Trump (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The United States' slice of the international tourism pie is declining, according to a new report from Foursquare that looks at data from millions of phones worldwide. The US share of international tourism dropped 16% in March 2017 compared with the previous year. And it declined an average of 11% year over year in months spanning October 2016 to March 2017, according to the report. The drop coincides with the final month of the US election, the Trump transition, and the early months of the Trump administration, which notably imposed a travel ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries in January 2017 that was eventually halted in court but is currently under appeal. Declines in tourism market share from people originating in the Middle East were more pronounced than the rest of the world, down 25% this January, along with a smaller decrease from South America, Foursquare found. The data accounts for the percentage of international tourism coming to the US and not the absolute number of tourists, but Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck told BuzzFeed News that it's unlikely tourist visits to the US increased while share declined. "I don't think you'd see a 16% decline in international market share and absolute numbers being up. I don't think that's compatible," he said. "The volume of tourism doesn't change that fast."
There have to be consequences when a country treats their visitors the way the US do.
As a Canadian who vacations at least 2 to 3 times a year in the US, I can confirm that we will be curtailing our travels to not only some of the new Trumpisms we simply don't want to deal with (e.g. threat of being heavily annoyed at the border) but the extremely unattractive US Dollar exchange.
Seriously though, Florida and border states (we live next to NY and VT) will feel it the most. We have seen it in the past, and some places will get desperate enough to sell stuff at par.
On a different note, Americans, please come to Canada and spend your money here, we don't really hate you, we love your tourist dollars. Buy stuff.
thanks
Not true. For most currencies (with some exceptions), the dollar value has been mostly flat since early 2016, and the majority of the dollar rate increase happened before then.
For some currencies, like Indian rupees and Mexican pesos, the value has gone down after Trump took office, which should have boosted tourism.
If another country started to demand people's social media passwords, full access to phones, etc. as a possible condition to enter, I certainly wouldn't want to go there. Who wants to be treated like a criminal when they're on vacation trying to relax and have a good time?
People take their privacy seriously. The word has gotten around that the US is poking more and more into people's data when they visit. There's plenty of other beautiful places to visit in the world, so obviously tourism to the US will go down.
Treat visitors as guests and not suspiciously, damnit.
Maybe our tourism boards can start targeting the fetish scene.
I was speaking to someone from a tour company that organises special interest escorted tours all around the world. He said they have stopped running tours to the US because they've had so many bad experiences with border protection. If one person out of a group gets held for a couple of hours, they're not only traumatised but the whole tour gets off on a wrong foot.
Another factor is the exchange rate. The dollar was strengthening in the last half of 2016 and thus coming to the US was becoming more expensive.
It was not created by Trump and the Kushner family isn't using it any way that's not available to other businesses to attract foreign investors. Most other countries (like Canada) have similar programs to attract high net worth immigrants.
Trump had, literally, nothing to do with it. Here is a June 28th 2016 article about the searches, but our racist media gave Obama a pass until Trump got elected. And then, before the President-elect even entered office, there was an avalanche of articles about the "new" procedures — not directly blaming him, but planting the negative thoughts in the gullible heads (like yours and those of your adoring moderators here today). Only some of the reports mentioned the truth:
So, no, it had nothing to do with Trump. More likely, the reason is the growth of dollar since last December — vacationing in the US simply became more expensive for foreigners, while going abroad became cheaper for Americans.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You're right.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/0...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think the main problem is if you look middle-eastern and the border agents are having a particularly bad day then you might get denied entry for no apparent reason at all. This has happened to several Canadians and apparently without even an explanation. This has caused entire conferences and school trips to be cancelled and or moved to Canada because on a class field trip, no teacher wants to have to deal with a situation where a student is left behind. Heck there was an Iranian Student who was invited to speak to a US trade show on refrigeration because of something new he had invented who got denied entry. Can you imagine how disappointing it would be to lose your lead speaker at a Conference because of such issues. This plus poor currency exchange, apparently gun violence issues and possibility issues at the border are scaring people away.
I haven't seen data for 2016 or 2017. Tourism in France has gone up continuously between 2010 to 2015 by roughly 10%. Paris is the fifth most visited city in the world, and France the most visited country. In the same time period the tourism in Egypt has gone down from about 14 to 9 million, but 2010 was a peak year. Belgium's curve is remarkably flat but has gone up about 15% in that period.