Last week’s announcement that Canada’s WestJet airline is cutting 16 routes to the U.S. and several cities from its route map is only the latest in bad news for U.S. tourism by overseas visitors, a trend that started last year and appears to be accelerating this year.
The so-called ‘Trump Slump’ resulted in the U.S. getting 11 million fewer international visitors last year, the only major tourism destination to see a decline. The decline for the year was 6%; in the new year, January saw another 4.8% drop over January, 2025. The drop was sharpest in visitors from Canada, second-largest source of U.S. visitors after Mexico. Route cuts by major Canadian airlines reflect a 28% drop in Canadian travel to the U.S. There were also significant drops from Germany and France; only the UK went up, but only by half a percent.
Among the factors pushing the decline are not only widespread stories of European and other travelers being turned away or in some cases held in weeks or months of detention over errors in paperwork, but also steep increases in visa fees and heavy increases in visitor fees for overseas visitors at major national parks, which have traditionally been popular among overseas visitors. And, a perception of violent government action hasn’t helped either. Going forward, U.S. policies that will require submission of five years of social media records are likely to depress the total further.
The World Travel and Tourism Council estimates that the cost of the drop to the tourism industry for the coming year could be about $15.7 billion, even more than for the year just past.
