We Said Last Month that it couldn’t go on like this; it didn’t. It got worse.
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTT0) last week released preliminary data on international arrivals through the first three quarters of 2017 which suggest that, if the global market performance of the U.S. as a destination continues as it did through September, it will fall short of the number of international visitors who came to the U.S. in 2016—meaning two straight years of decline.
Just about every measure in the monthly arrivals report (for September 2017) just released by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) was the same as, if not worse than, it was for the previous month.
In terms of overall international visitor arrivals, the trend line established in the first three quarters of 2017 suggest that it will continue through the end of the year. In addition, the fourth quarter of the year usually produces the second-lowest quarter for the number of international visitors the United States. It is very unlikely, then, that the fourth quarter of 2017 will produce a turnaround sufficient to make the year a better one than 2016.
Europe Bouncing Back? Midst the falling numbers in most world regions, the oldest overseas source market, Europe, is doing fairly well. Of the five core markets in the Eurozone—Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands—all but Germany showed small, single-digit percentage increases through September 2017. And Germany was almost at the same level as it was the year before. Perhaps this is because of a slow, but steady increase in the value of the euro vs. the U.S. dollar, which was trading at $1.04 in December 2016, but lately has been at or near $1.24—a 19 percent increase.
